Conservatism IS Compatible with Science Fiction, Part 2

Continuing the conversation that started here:

I freely concede that SF/F fandom is heavily dominated by people from the looney left. But books don't get published to please them. (Good thing--they cannot be pleased.) Publishers publish the books they think will sell, and that's going to be based on what they think the market is like.

Here, I think we've run into an important area of disagreement -- because people like me don't think publishers are simply reacting to the existing market. And I think we have good reasons for this belief. All the data I've seen regarding market trends in publishing reveal that traditional houses are losing readers to the independents. This is especially true in SF and romance, which have both positively exploded on Amazon. If publishers actually were putting out books that are attractive to the wider reading audience, I don't think this would be happening. I don't think those readers would feel the need to seek out that unknown self-published author's space fantasy instead of what's being published by Tor.

Now, I'll grant that some traditional publishers might think they're responding to market forces. That's entirely possible. But that doesn't mean they truly are. Publishers are, in my view, an incredibly insular and homogeneous group. Based on my observations, they're overwhelmingly urban, affluent, and similarly educated. (And what the hell: let's throw in white and female too.) The chances that they have their fingers on the pulse of the general public are pretty slim. Indeed, I think what they're hearing from their friends over drinks at an NYC restaurant is drastically skewing their estimation of what we, the readers, truly want -- and is therefore leading to a profound over-representation of some worldviews and lifestyles and a profound under-representation of others.

Additionally: contrary to your claim that books aren't getting published to appease political radicals, it seems clear that people from the loony left are having a disproportionate - and toxic - impact on what comes out of traditional houses. Maybe (?) social justice warriors aren't having much of an impact on what does get published -- but they're certainly having an impact on what doesn't. Most publishers have fallen for the sensitivity reader grift, for example, which allows these self-appointed political commissars enormous power to quash writers' artistic expression. (I'm violently opposed to the concept of official sensitivity readers. Authors have a responsibility to do their research, obviously, but nobody has the right to speak for entire groups of people regarding what is or isn't offensive. And besides, making such concessions doesn't seem to work anyway; recently, an SF mag ran a short story tackling trans themes by sensitivity readers and yet still got slammed once that story hit print. As you say, you can't please these people.) And these self-same publishers have frequently kowtowed to Twitter activists by yanking books from their schedules for reasons that are generally facile. A reviewer on Goodreads with poor reading comprehension skills and a political ax to grind can - and has - wreaked havoc for many a well-meaning author. This is a terrible state of affairs -- and another reason why I'm more skeptical in re: traditional publishing's supposed adherence to reader demand.

I'm also not trying to say that all conservatives or all Christians have the same opinions. But if half of potential conservative readers reject SF/F because of global warming, and half reject it because of the Second Coming, and half reject it because they don't want to read about changes, then (assuming statistical independence) you've lost almost 90% of your base group.

I think you're overestimating how many in the base group would be bounced out of SF by those things. I mean, yeah: my late grandmother was a Catholic conservative who thought SF was just silly and/or possibly demonic. But my late father - also a Catholic conservative - adored SF and left behind a large library of SF to prove it. And my brother and I - Catholic and conservative just like Dad - follow in our father's footsteps, not grandma's. I think the further down the generational chain you go, the smaller and smaller the group you're talking about becomes. And as for statistical independence -- no, I think those three things are strongly correlated. And that means, again, the group you're talking about probably represents a minority of all people who identify as conservative.

And here's one other question: why does global warming have to be a defining feature of SF? It's an important issue, sure (like I said, I'm basically a crunchy con), but aren't there a thousand other things SF can and should explore? Does every work of SF have to contain global warming themes and therefore turn off that tiny subset who can't tolerate encountering them? Shouldn't SF address a diversity of topics instead of hammering relentlessly on one?

Are most conservatives just too serious for the genre today--regardless of the political content?

Eh. A minority of them are. (See also: my grandma.) And whenever I've encountered them, I've always chided them for their humorlessness. But again, I would caution against using your personal experience with your religious Southern relatives as a judge because many, many folks - including yours truly - have had entirely different lived experiences. I'm connected via several online social media groups to hundreds of self-identified righties who can't get enough of SF so long as it's more in-line with their preferences. And if you don't believe my self report, well -- the success of "Kindle Unlimited book factories" like Chris Kennedy Publishing also attests to these fans' real hunger for the genre. (CKP doesn't intentionally cater to cons, mind you, but because their books lean toward action and mil-SF, their audience does take on a reddish hue just by accident.) Discounting or minimizing these fans' existence because, to progressives, they're politically unpalatable is, I think, a huge mistake.

And now to your final question:

I think some concrete examples might make it easier to talk about. Do you have a few books in mind with elements that illustrate the problem?

One example that was brought up recently in one of my groups was Robert J. Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax trilogy. As the writer of the post complained:

This series just ticks every box on the SFWA list doesn't it?

1. Males are bad and the root cause of everything
2. Eugenics is awesome
3. Pansexuality is great and the nuclear family is bad
4. Religion is a hallucination caused by a correctable mutation in the human brain
5. Communism is awesome
6. Total government monitoring of every moment of your life is necessary for freedom
7. The planet's environment has been destroyed irreparably by mankind's greed
8. Capitalism is the root of evil
9. Guns are bad
10. Agrarian society is evil

And yeah, I have to admit these were all reasons why I personally bounced out of these books too. The bias of the author was so overwhelming that it completely overshadowed the story. On the other hand, as I mentioned in the last post, I don't see a lot of people in my circles bouncing off Heinlein whenever he presupposes that Earth's resources will surely be taxed by massive overpopulation. Perhaps that's because Heinlein doesn't alienate conservatives with all of his predictions. Maybe his works have more balance.

Anyhoo, that's my $0.02,