126 thoughts on “Science Fiction & Fantasy Creators Guild Launches Prematurely”

1. There’s an important distinction between stories where the political message is subtle and blends into the background vs. those where the political message interrupts the story the way an infodump does.

   I’m thinking of a Torgersen story where people from a human society that has been gender-free for 1,000 years meets some binary humans and instantly become offended when someone uses the word “she.” (Never mind that this makes as much sense as someone today being offended that someone called them “thee” when they didn’t know each other very well.) The message goes on and on and simply destroys the story.

   A message is like anything else in a story. It can be done well or poorly. Left-wing/right-wing writers have no monopoly on screwing this up.

   Perhaps we need a new term: “Message dumps.” Just as “info” is okay but “infodumps” ruin a story, it’s okay for a story to have a message, but “message dumps” are fatal.

2. @John A Arkansawyer I’d be interested to know which “self-described non political creators” you specifically have in mind in your argument? I’m inclined to believe it’s not Paol and Pals, because 1) you come across as an intelligent person with a grasp of the facts and 2) it’s been made repeatedly, publicly clear that when it’s convenient to them these dudes are very willing to engage in conservative and/or alt right political networks, and to develop or collaborate with works espousing that political goal. So I assume you’ve also reasoned from this that the specific “Nutty Nuggets” argument made here is inconsistent and/or disingenuous.

   I agree that there are degrees of political-ness (although I don’t think the scale reaches zero, or that there is one “objective” measure of political-ness for any given work, or that subjective ratings stay static over time). But I’m not sure what the purpose of establishing that agreement is, given that there’s no good faith, consistent beliefs about non-political works to engage with in this news story, and I’m not yet clear how your alternative hypothetical actors might tie in. Where are you going with this?

3. All arguably true, all still totally irrelevant to the belief of the person creating such art that their art is not political.

   Their belief is a political belief.

4. @Arifel: Yeah, these cats stink pretty badly of disingenuousity. I’m not arguing for them.

   For examples of artists who didn’t think of themselves as political, I’d suggest most newspaper cartoonists. I’m not aware of George Herriman ever claiming his art was political, and I’m not sure it ever crossed his mind. It is political, I think–how could it not be, all things considered?–but did he think so? I doubt it.

   @Aaron:

   All arguably true, all still totally irrelevant to the belief of the person creating such art that their art is not political.

   Their belief is a political belief.

   Certainly true, in my opinion, but they don’t agree. Those damn artists. Malcontents. Or perhaps they’re pleased giving you a paradox to work with.

   I had this one Great Teacher with whom I had many disagreements–I keep waiting for my tastes to mature enough to appreciate Milton, but this is close as I’ve got–and one was on the value of the philosophy and ideas of the Beat Generation. “Either everything is holy or nothing is holy,” he complained. I said that one was easy and everything is holy, even Moloch. But I understood him. “When everything is holy, nothing is holy” is a reasonable objection. So is “When everything is political, nothing is political”–less reasonable, but still not stupid.

5. I would argue that the belief of the artist that they are creating apolitical work is irrelevant to the content of the work being political. Tolkien swore to his dying day that Lord of the Rings had nothing to do with World War II, but to the eyes of any reader, it was blindingly obvious that he was profoundly affected by it. It’s impossible to escape creating political art because it’s impossible to be an apolitical person and your beliefs inform your work. You just can’t write generic art and still have it be great.

6. Certainly true, in my opinion, but they don’t agree.

   And they are wrong. Their disagreement is a political statement.

   I’m not aware of George Herriman ever claiming his art was political

   You don’t think a mixed-race cartoonist who had more than one sequence in his strips in which a character is flipped back and forth between black and white and experiences different reactions depending on what color they are knew his art was political in nature?

7. I do think there are books and art where there is no real meaning to talk about its politics, even if you can always dissect anything and draw conclusions from it. But to use Frankenstein as an example!?

   Here’s from chapter 13:

   ““Every conversation of the cottagers now opened new wonders to me. While I listened to the instructions which Felix bestowed upon the Arabian, the strange system of human society was explained to me. I heard of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty, of rank, descent, and noble blood.

   “The words induced me to turn towards myself. I learned that the possessions most esteemed by your fellow creatures were high and unsullied descent united with riches. A man might be respected with only one of these advantages, but without either he was considered, except in very rare instances, as a vagabond and a slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profits of the chosen few! “

8. @Aaron:

   Certainly true, in my opinion, but they don’t agree.

   And they are wrong. Their disagreement is a political statement.

   I mostly agree with you that they are wrong. What you or I believe about that is irrelevant to what they believe how it affects the quality of their art.

   As to George Herriman, I picked him because his art is obviously political to my eye. Yet the politics of it cut directly against those of his greatest champion, William Randolph Hearst. Hearst seems not to have seen the strip as political. And while I’m not a deep expert in Herriman’s life, I’ve never seen any indication that he did, either.

   I realize asking you to refute that is essentially asking you to prove a negative (unless you have the perfect citation at hand, in which case I’ll admit to being wrong and shift to a different example), so I don’t claim this is some sort of rhetorical victory, just a statement of my position.

   What does surprise me is that folks such as yourself who argue strenuously for the irrelevance of authorial intent are so invested in this particular question of intent.

9. It’s a mistake to assume that the social or political meaning of a work of art is always — or even usually — the product of a conscious choice on the creator’s part. More often, it’s there because of the creator’s assumptions and the questions they didn’t ask: every new movie or video game with a straight white male protagonist sends the message that this is the default protagonist simply by not questioning it.

10. It’s politics all the way down.

    @standback,
    Great comment!

11. What you or I believe about that is irrelevant to what they believe how it affects the quality of their art.

    The point is that they are making art that is informed by politics.

    Yet the politics of it cut directly against those of his greatest champion, William Randolph Hearst. Hearst seems not to have seen the strip as political.

    And? What Hearst may or may not have seen is irrelevant.

    so I don’t claim this is some sort of rhetorical victory, just a statement of my position.

    Given that his political statements were so clearly at odds with the prevailing sentiment of the day (and as you pointed out, counter to his publisher’s bent), at what point would you think he would have spoken out on the issue? I’m just having a hard time seeing how an artist who injected political elements into his work of the sort that Herriman did would have done so without knowing that was what he was doing.

    What does surprise me is that folks such as yourself who argue strenuously for the irrelevance of authorial intent are so invested in this particular question of intent.

    An author’s beliefs affect their art, even if they think they are apolitical. And that is the injection of politics into their work. If you are making art that is devoid of any of your beliefs, you probably aren’t making good art.

12. @Aaron:

    An author’s beliefs affect their art, even if they think they are apolitical. And that is the injection of politics into their work. If you are making art that is devoid of any of your beliefs, you probably aren’t making good art.

    If only the agent denounced as a “cancer” had said that instead! I would have agreed wholeheartedly. Which I do now.

    I had to look carefully to find the original statement, which no one quoted, and which I should have thought to quote myself, which was a silly oversight for me to make.

    It is: “ALL ART IS POLITICAL. If you don’t agree, you’re making bad art.”

    And that’s just not so.

13. Aaron, If you are making art that is devoid of any of your beliefs, you probably aren’t making good art

    <noddy> Hotel room art.

    There’s certainly a place for bland decor-level art, but I don’t think anyone will ever claim that it’s great art. And most of the artists I know, whether visual, literary, or auditory, are at least trying to make great art, not “decor”.

14. I will add that Alexa Rowland had quite a good thread on this as well:

    https://twitter.com/_alexrowland/status/953754392657891329

    Mind you, I’m a sucker for anything that dates back to my disillusion with Narnia. Very Young Wombat is still angry about that.

15. I think if you are unaware that you are at minimum reinforcing existing political structures in making your art, it’s extremely likely you are making bad art.

    To get to the point where you are not doing so, you almost have to get to the point of the retiree taking a nice Sunday watercolour class. And even then, part of the reason that those classes suggest such imagery as they tend towards – vases of flowers, landscapes of the sort widely agreed-upon to be aesthetically pleasing, still lifes, maybe a portrait if it’s of grandkids or family etc. – is specifically to try and push pleasantry and avoid any kind of contentious matter. It’s a whole layer of attempting to smother out the possibility of conflict, of politics, which makes that subject matter seem so staid.

    Which is fine if it’s a Sunday watercolour class work you are going for. There’s a place for it in the world, especially if life outside of it is in some way difficult and it’s meant to be your happy escape.

    But you (generic) do not want a whole genre of literature to look like the equivalent of a Sunday art class. You certainly do not want to advertise yourself as so empty of subject matter that even the retirees who make the tiny rebellions of painting portraits of their fellows wrinkles and all instead of their grandkids, or hide wolves in the bushes of their landscapes, look at what you’re offering and say, “no thanks, that’s too dull for me.”

16. That is a great twitter thread.

17. @Aaron: One final quibble.

    When you say, “Given that [Herriman’s] political statements were so clearly at odds with the prevailing sentiment of the day,” well, I don’t take that as a given. Not that his political statements weren’t current, but that they were political statements at all. You understand them as political statements; I understand his work as political. Did he?

    So I understand much of his work as political; I question whether it is a political statement.

18. You understand them as political statements; I understand his work as political. Did he?

    You’re making an unwarranted leap from Herriman not explicitly commenting upon the political nature of his work to him being unaware of, and not intending to include political material in his work. I don’t see any evidence that would suggest that he didn’t know what he was doing, and it seems fairly insulting to infer that from his silence.

19. @Aaron: “You’re making an unwarranted leap from Herriman not explicitly commenting upon the political nature of his work to him being unaware of, and not intending to include political material in his work.”

    Possibly that’s so. Or possibly he did not intend that material as political. Since he was so deeply closeted, your objection to my taking inferences from his silence is especially well-taken. Unfortunately, it also means there isn’t much from his mouth to directly support either side of the argument.

20. Unfortunately, it also means there isn’t much from his mouth to directly support either side of the argument.

    Given that you advanced the claim that Herriman didn’t think his work was political, the onus would be on you to establish the veracity of that assertion.

21. This is my favourite artist, Hans Arnold. I guess there are ties in someway to his beliefs and politics, but I have no idea what it would be and it doesn’t really matter.

    You can call it political if you want to. I’m only here for the monsters.

22. c4c

23. @Aaron: “Given that you advanced the claim that Herriman didn’t think his work was political, the onus would be on you to establish the veracity of that assertion.”

    That’s reasonably fair. I also think it’s fair to regard it as unknown. Possibly unknowable.

24. Is this news in fandom? This looks like something that should have been ignored.

25. My least-unprintable short reaction to the new group is “what a bunch of hopeless wankers”.

    However, @Aaron’s

    Asserting that their art is non-political makes their art political.
    Their claim is, in itself, a political claim.

    is a catch-22 that tells us more about the one asserter than about the universe of art.

26. Tolkien swore to his dying day that Lord of the Rings had nothing to do with World War II, but to the eyes of any reader, it was blindingly obvious that he was profoundly affected by it.

    This is yet another wrinkle in the vexed matter of identifying the politics a writer puts into their art. There’s no reason to think Tolkien lied about his not writing in response to WWII, but it looms far larger for us than WWI, and so when we see elements that remind us of WWII we assume that’s the “actual” reference. But Tolkien actually fought in WWI, and I’d argue LotR is far more the product of that war than the next.

    But we can only see correspondences that are within our knowledge. If you’re unfamiliar with the issues a work is addressing, you won’t see them as politics within the work. If you’re familiar with some other, maybe similar issues, you’re going to assume that is what the story is about.

    This is something I’ve noticed more obviously since I’ve had work out that lots of people comment on. I know what my models for various things in my books are, but it’s interesting to me how often someone will be absolutely convinced that, say, I was obviously modeling the treatment of tea plantation workers in Ancillary Sword on slaves in the American South. Except, you know, I wasn’t. But it was super obvious to that person. Or the folks who are sure I modeled the Radch on the British Empire. Except I didn’t.

    This is some of why some folks can say that Frankenstein is a good example of non-political SF. (Well, that and the likelihood that they’ve seen a movie or two and haven’t actually read the book, which is quite explicitly political, as has already been pointed out.) If you don’t understand the context in which a book was written, you’re likely to mis-identify aspects of the politics it contains. Or miss them entirely and think it’s just a cracking adventure about a monster made from dismembered corpses.

    But if there’s one thing seeing people comment on my work has taught me, it’s to be far less confident than I used to about what any given author was trying to say.

27. Matthew M. Foster: Is this news in fandom? This looks like something that should have been ignored.

    Agreed that one attention-seeker with a website under construction would be merely part of the background noise in social media. What made it a story worth telling was the reaction comments by well-known writers, some vastly entertaining, others sincere defenses against the implied criticism of politics in art.

28. To enter briefly into the Tolkien conversation, my recollection of Tolkien’s introduction to the Ring Trilogy expressed less a concerned about people seeing influences from political events on the text, Tolkien himself mentions the likely influence of WWI on the text, than he was with the novels being read as allegory, which Tolkien detested.

29. John Seavey:
    Tolkien swore to his dying day that Lord of the Rings had nothing to do with World War II, but to the eyes of any reader, it was blindingly obvious that he was profoundly affected by it. It’s impossible to escape creating political art because it’s impossible to be an apolitical person and your beliefs inform your work. You just can’t write generic art and still have it be great.

    I don’t think that’s what Tolkien said. Of course the Lord of the Rings was informed by Tolkien’s war experiences. How could it not have?

    What Tolkien objected to was the idea LotR was an allegory of WW2 and said so in a foreword to LoTR that he “cordially disliked allegory in all its forms”. IIRC, he never denied that there were parallels one could draw between LotR & WW2, calling it “applicability”, but you can’t do a close mapping of fictional events in LotR to the historic events of WW2.

30. is a catch-22 that tells us more about the one asserter than about the universe of art.

    Some things are inescapable like that. Just as the statement “All philosophy is bunk” is, itself, a philosophical argument, the claim “my work is non-political” is itself a political statement.

31. There’s also such a thing as defining words in such a way as to convey no information. If you say “all stories are political” then you’ve adopted a definition of “political” that has zero meaning. That’s fine, but then you can’t reasonably complain about people who use a definition that does have meaning. Perhaps “overtly political” would be a better phrase?

32. It’s interesting that the examples of artists who are provoking discussion here aren’t specifically SFF writers. I’d point out there’s also a version of this argument that says that not all art is necessarily political, but SFF literature has to be (because you always have at least some worldbuilding variables to answer, and the way you do so has political implications about how your world is ordered).

    I had a think about SFF people who fit John A^2’s proposition (people who appear to genuinely believe their work has no political content), and a prominent one is Andy Weir. The linked article is certainly not the only place I’ve seen him make a nutty nuggets argument and assert his fiction isn’t bothered with all that.

    To which I have two things to point out:

    1. Despite its flaws, I enjoyed Weir’s recent novel, “The Political Economy of the Moon is a Settled Question With No Bearing On This Plot”, especially on audiobook. It wasn’t as good as “(Chinese Foreign Policy is Irrelevant to the Fate of) The Martian”, but he’s shown he’s a fun if undemanding author.

    2. Based on what’s out in his public persona, I cannot imagine Andy Weir looking at the current state of SFFCG, going ooo there’s a great organisation that supports my (odd) beliefs about my own work and my desire to avoid political drama, and putting his name down. As others have noted, the “no politics” stance can be “you must accept my works that go against the political grain RIGHT NOW”, but it can clearly also be “leave me out of that field of conflict please”.

    I’m SURE the founders of this exciting new enterprise are thinking hard about how to tailor their social media strategy to the second kind of “apolitical” person.

33. @Greg the assertion “all works are political” does not, on its own, make the definition of politics meaningless, in the same way that “all humans have a respiratory system” does not make the definition of respiration meaningless.

    It’s certainly useful to be able to talk about the political content of Informocracy – a book about electoral systems – differently to how we talk about e.g. Connie Willis’ time travel books, where assumptions about political concepts like class and social order are not nearly so foregrounded, but still playing a fundamental role in how the narratives develop. But I doubt I need a specific pair of boxes (overtly political or not) to do that effectively. I’ll just use my words…

34. Some of George Herriman’s art was explicitly political, other examples were apolitical.

    As far as needing to know context to recognize political elements, the first linked example shows a “Trained Trout” in a fishbowl held by “Dunn”. William Ellsworth Dunn was a lobbyist for the South Pacific railways and a part of the Republican machine in southern California. J. H. Trout was the machine candidate for coroner.

    If you look at contemporary commentary about him, he wasn’t seen as especially political, despite having started his career doing editorial cartoons at the Los Angeles Herald.

    There is a brand new biography of Herriman which I’d love to get ahold of.

35. @Arifel: I agree with you that “all works are political” isn’t a Catch-22. What makes it less useful for me is that it’s a statement about “all works” rather than “a work”. When all art is by definition political, where does that leave explicitly political art? The video for “Surrender Under Protest” is not political like the video for “Call Me Maybe”.

    (There are at least two very different shades of meaning in those four uses of “political” in that there paragraph. Do we mean political like “the waitress is practicing politics”?)

    ETA: Did you see Andy Weir saying this? “Ultimately, it comes down to economics. Where you have an unregulated — for lack of a better term, libertarian society — people will be like, “Oh, where there are no laws, the best place to take advantage of stuff like that is economically.” ” And then this: “Well, I’m not trying to get too deep into political speculation, and I certainly didn’t have any political agenda here, but I think that’s just how frontier towns are. Frontier towns, if you think of the Old West, you’ve got a sheriff, and that’s about it. Laws aren’t strictly enforced, because you don’t have the police force that is able to enforce things like zoning. You don’t have a strong central government in a little isolated society like that. ” I’m sure he has no political agenda, but that’s very political.

36. Here is an examination of elements of Krazy Kat and Herriman’s life that shows how the political elements change over time. Whether or not Krazy Kat was male or female (he/she/it wasn’t) is certainly viewed through a political lens now; when current, it was viewed much more as one of many peculiar comic elements of the strip.

37. @Bill: That’s a very good point about Herriman. His political cartooning was certainly political. I was thinking specifically of Krazy Kat, and should have said so.

38. Here is the examination I neglected to actually link to earlier.

39. It may be useful to distinguish between the artist’s intent, and how the viewer receives the art. Someone who believes all art is political will see political elements that someone like myself does not see, and that the artist did not intend. It is just as correct for the former to say that the art is political as it is for the artist to say it is not. Given that art has different meanings to different people (a statement that I doubt many here would disagree with), clearly then the political content of the art can be just as dependent on the viewpoint of the receiver as it is on the work itself.

    In other words, whether or not a work of art is “political” is a subjective, not an objective statement. De gustibus non est disputandum.

40. @John A Arkansawyer – to me, what that means is that we talk about explicitly political art in terms of individual cases, or artistic movements, and what specific political thought they are bringing to the table, because it’s the specific political content that would be interesting, not the fact that political content exists. That’s the same reason I don’t find the label “message fiction” very helpful – because it’s highly subjective, and seems designed to problematise the existence of overt political statements in SFF, without actually engaging with the statements themselves and why we might want to problematise them.

    When I talk about politics (in SFF lit or in the day job) I’m referring to the assumptions and comments being made, and conflicts arising from, societal decision-making and distribution of power among humans* – either through the lens of one particular system, or an interaction between more than one different system. Admittedly this isn’t an adequate definition to talk about e.g. politics in art history, because it doesn’t have a historical context component, but that’s a question of me not having time or expertise to put that labour in – I believe that an adequate, sensible definition exists which covers that too.

    We do not disagree on Andy Weir! My point 1 above was supposed to ridicule the idea that his work (especially Artemis) is “apolitical”. There’s a ton of assumptions about political economy, leadership, class, migration, cultural diversity and integration etc. in that book and the fact that the author doesn’t notice them (and decides to gnxr n gba bs pbasyvpg bhg bs gurz guebhtu n oryvrs-fgergpuvatyl pbairavrag vaqhfgevny vaabingvba)… kinda makes me wince.

    *or analogous sentient life

41. Greg:

    There’s an important distinction between stories where the political message is subtle and blends into the background vs. those where the political message interrupts the story the way an infodump does.

    As you note, that’s a craft issue rather than a political one. If these guys were out there inveighing for skillful writing, I could get behind that (though it’s a subjective judgment, of course). But they often don’t seem to care about the craft, it’s the content that riles them.

    If you say “all stories are political” then you’ve adopted a definition of “political” that has zero meaning.

    Uh, no.

    John:

    For examples of artists who didn’t think of themselves as political, I’d suggest most newspaper cartoonists. I’m not aware of George Herriman ever claiming his art was political, and I’m not sure it ever crossed his mind. It is political, I think–how could it not be, all things considered?–but did he think so? I doubt it.

    Herriman was a black man passing as white at a time when that was dangerous. And echoes of it crop up in KRAZY KAT over and over. I think he thought about it; I don’t think he thought he was just producing affable nonsense. The ideas he was getting at may not have been crystallized for the reader, but I think Herriman knew what he was going on about.

    As for other newspaper cartoonists, a lot of them were actively political cartoonists, but even among the strip artists, plenty of them were overtly political, ranging from Harold Gray to Walt Kelly to Al Capp to Garry Trudeau, but even those who do strips like, say, LUANN are thinking about gender roles and authority structures and so on. It may be light entertainment, but it’s not unconscious.

    [Although there’s unconscious political content, too, as strips like MARY WORTH stand up for certain values that the creators may not regularly think of as political speech, but just “rightness.” Still political, of course.]

42. Some people see politics as tied to organizing for causes in some way. Some people see politics also in power-relations on a personal level. Depending on what view you have, you will see the same work as political or apolitical.

43. @Ann Leckie

    But we can only see correspondences that are within our knowledge. If you’re unfamiliar with the issues a work is addressing, you won’t see them as politics within the work. If you’re familiar with some other, maybe similar issues, you’re going to assume that is what the story is about.

    That’s a very good point. Regarding your Ancillary Sword example, I have noticed that Americans tend to view any slavery/forced labour situation in fiction as a reference to slavery in the pre-Civil War South, because that’s the example that’s most familiar to them. But the Southern US did not invent slavery and the author/creator may well have had a different example in mind. As might a reader from a different cultural background.

    One example I can offer is the original Battlestar Galactica, which is widely considered to be a science fictional take on Mormon persecution with the Book of Exodus and an anti-disarmament message mixed in. When I first saw the series as a kid in the 1980s, the anti-disarmament message went completely over my head, because I lived in an environment where everybody was in favour of nuclear disarmament. I also had no idea what Mormons were and while I was familiar with the Book of Exodus, of course, I didn’t see any parallels nor did I even consider them.

    Nonetheless, the situation of the ragtag refugee fleet under constant threat of attack resonated with me a lot. While nowhere near the scale of today, there was an influx of refugees in West Germany in the 1980s and some of them had even come to the small rural village where I lived. What was more, not long before I first saw Battlestar Galactica I found myself aboard a civilian flight out of Colombo during the Black July riots of 1983. I was flying from Singapore to Amsterdam with my Mom and during a stopover in Columbo, the normally half-empty flight suddenly filled up to the last seat with terrified people desperate to get out and a Swiss woman told us about fires and people beaten up in the streets. Finally, I’d also grown up with the stories elderly people told of being forced to flee those parts of Poland, Russia and the Czech Republic that were once German towards the end of WWII and how they’d escaped on ships and trains crammed to the rafters with women and children, while the Red Army was shooting at them and how many didn’t make it.

    So when I first saw Battlestar Galactica, these were the images that came to my mind and that’s why the story resonated with me. Now I’m perfectly sure that Glen A. Larson never had any of those examples in mind, when he created Galactica. However, due to my personal experiences that show resonated with me on a far deeper level (and that’s probably also part of the reason why I will always have a soft spot for it) than if it had just been a story about Mormons and the Book of Exodus in space.

44. I have started to buy annotated versions of the old classics. There was just so much stuff I missed in them that was referring to current discussions on science, philosophy, politics and religions. The books became so much deeper and fullfilling with all extra foot notes.

    And that is why it was fun to find this version of Frankenstein with essays by Elizabeth Bear, Cory Doctorow, Heather E. Douglas, Josephine Johnston, Kate MacCord, Jane Maienschein, Anne K. Mellor, Alfred Nordmann.

    I will have to order it.

45. @Kurt: I’m sure Herriman didn’t think of his work in Krazy Kat as affable nonsense. I’m just not sure that means he thought of it as political.

    All y’all, I don’t disagree nearly all art–maybe all art–is political. I’m saying that many people who create art which is undeniably political don’t think of it as political.

    It’s a noted phenomenon that Americans in particular do not see undeniably political things as being political–or much of anything as being political. This politics-blindness seems to me to be a logical consequence of that. (And surely of many other things besides that.) Why would artists in this depoliticized society necessarily think of politics as political? Of what advantage is it to them?

    It’s like Yakov Smirnov would’ve said if he’d been Tall Boy Busch and gone from the US to the SU to make his fortune: “In America, politics takes interest in YOU!”

    ETA: I am getting an urge for that newish book on Herriman. If it proves me wrong, I’m okay with that. I’m so glad my Krazy Kat stuff didn’t get lost or stolen.

46. @Ann Leckie @Cora that’s a really interesting point – the parallels we draw from work can easily be different from those, if any, that the author intended. Death of the author and all that.

    ——————

    What I’m completely failing to imagine is a specifically SFF work which doesn’t have anything in its worldbuilding about the social organisation and power relations of humans (or analogous species). I guess it would be more plausible at shorter lengths? But if you’re writing a novel, what would be speculative about a work with no grounding in any sort of place at all, or in a place completely indistinguishable from some “neutral” existing location? Is there an SFF novel out there about a small number of characters with no power-based interpersonal conflicts hanging out in a political vacuum (…Annihilation but without the mysterious scientific agency and the, uh, power based conflicts)? It’s so hard to envision a book which wouldn’t intrinsically have some form of political stance encoded into it, even if individual readers don’t recognise it or understand the context the author had in mind. I also don’t think a book has to foreground an explicitly political conflict for that political stance to have influence and meaning, if not to the author then to readers.

    In short, I’m still stuck on this question – what, specifically, in SFF, are we talking about when we talk about these people and works that avoid politics, by some definition or another, and can we find examples that don’t immediately seem laughably misguided (sorry Andy)? I’m not sure where this conversation on hypotheticals is getting us.

47. If you say “all stories are political” then you’ve adopted a definition of “political” that has zero meaning.

    No, it is just identifying politics as being an inherent part of storytelling.

48. I notice that the SFFCGuild twitter account has blocked Nick Mamatas, so that whole “open to all” thing seems to be not so well-observed in practice.

49. About apolitical art: Clasic Music can be that.
    If you count videogames then some old ones would count.
    Tetris is one example. (If I am wrong please tell me, would be interesting)

    About Weir: I identified 3 political messages in that work (and I would call it less political)
    1. Pro Spaceflight (that is not a left/right isue but is a political statement)
    2. Knowledge is good, can save your life (in the USA were some of the right is antiintellectual this is political)
    3. A belive in the good in poeple shown in the help the Chinese give to the USA.

    About the whole thing: I doubt that anyone who isn’t already a friend of Paolinelli will join, because what exactly are they joining? We know the name and that they wan’t to be apolitical nothing more.

50. We know the name and that they wan’t to be apolitical nothing more.

    We know a little bit more. For instance, we know:

    1. They want to see SF become purely escapist, the way they imagine it used to be.
    2. They think someone who says all art is political is a “cancer” on the field.
    3. They’re “coming for” SFWA and Worldcon.

    So, basically, we know that when they say they want to be apolitical, they’ve already failed. And that’s with just one actual member.

    Not that SFWA or Worldcon have anything to worry about.

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