Libertarianism and the Hard SF Renaissance
<p>(There is an extended and improved version of this essay, <a href='http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/sf-history.html'>A Political<br />
History of SF</a>.)</p>
<p>When I started reading SF in the late Sixties and early Seventies,<br />
the field was in pretty bad shape &mdash; not that I understood this<br />
at the time.  The death of the pulp-zines in the 1950s had pretty much<br />
killed off the SF short-fiction market, and the post-Star-Wars boom<br />
that would make SF the second most successful genre after romance<br />
fiction was still years in the future.  The core writers of the first<br />
&#8220;Golden Age&#8221;, the people who invented modern science fiction after<br />
John Campbell took the helm at <cite>Astounding</cite> in 1938, were<br />
beginning to get long in the tooth; Robert Heinlein, the greatest of<br />
them all, passed his peak after 1967.</p>
<p>These objective problems combined with, or perhaps led to, an insurgency<br />
within the field.  The &#8220;New Wave&#8221;, an attempt to import the techniques and<br />
imagery of literary fiction into SF, upset many of the field&#8217;s certainties.<br />
Before it, everyone took for granted that the center of Campbellian SF was<br />
&#8220;hard SF&#8221; &mdash; stories, frequently written by engineers and scientists,<br />
which trafficked in plausible and relatively rigorous extrapolations of<br />
science.</p>
<p>Hard SF was an art form that made stringent demands on both author<br />
and reader.  Stories could be, and were, mercilessly slammed because the<br />
author had calculated an orbit or gotten a detail of physics or biology<br />
wrong.  The Campbellian demand was that SF work both as story and<br />
as science, with only a bare minimum of McGuffins like FTL star drives<br />
permitted; hard SF demanded that the science be consistent both<br />
internally and with known science about the real world.</p>
<p>The New Wave rejected all this for reasons that were partly<br />
aesthetic and partly political.  For there was a political tradition<br />
that went with the hard-SF style, one exemplified by its chief<br />
theoretician (Campbell himself) and his right-hand man Robert<br />
Heinlein, the inventor of modern SF&#8217;s characteristic technique of<br />
exposition by indirection.  That tradition was of ornery and insistant<br />
individualism, veneration of the competent man, an instinctive<br />
distrust of coercive social engineering and a rock-ribbed objectivism<br />
that that valued knowing how things work and treated all political<br />
ideologizing with suspicion.</p>
<p>At the time, this very American position was generally thought of<br />
by both allies and opponents as a conservative or right-wing one.  But<br />
the SF community&#8217;s version was never conservative in the strict sense<br />
of venerating past social norms &mdash; how could it be, when SF<br />
literature cheerfully contemplated radical changes in social<br />
arrangements?  SF&#8217;s insistent individualism also led it to reject<br />
racism and feature strong female characters long before the rise of<br />
political correctness ritualized these behaviors in other forms<br />
of art.</p>
<p>After 1971, the implicit politics of Campbellian hard SF was<br />
reinvented, radicalized and intellectualized as libertarianism.<br />
Libertarians, in fact, would draw inspiration from Golden Age SF;<br />
Heinlein&#8217;s <cite>The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress</cite>, H. Beam Piper&#8217;s<br />
<cite>Lone Star Planet</cite>, and Poul Anderson&#8217;s <cite>No Truce With<br />
Kings</cite> (among many others) would come to be seen retrospectively<br />
as proto-libertarian arguments not just by the readers but by the<br />
authors themselves.</p>
<p>The New Wave was both a stylistic revolt and a political one.  Its<br />
inventors (notably Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss)<br />
were British socialists and Marxists who rejected individualism,<br />
linear exposition, happy endings, scientific rigor and the U.S.&#8217;s<br />
cultural hegemony over the SF field in one fell swoop.  The New Wave&#8217;s<br />
later American exponents were strongly associated with the New Left<br />
and opposition to the Vietnam War, leading to some rancorous public<br />
disputes in which politics was tangled together with definitional<br />
questions about the nature of SF and the direction of the field.</p>
<p>But the New Wave was not, in fact, the first revolt against hard SF.<br />
In the 1950s, a group of young writers centered around Frederik Pohl<br />
and the Futurians fan club in New York had invented sociological S.F.<br />
(exemplified by the Pohl/Kornbluth collaboration <cite>The Space<br />
Merchants</cite>).  Not until decades later did the participants admit<br />
that many of the key Futurians were then ideological Communists or<br />
fellow travellers, but their work was half-understood at the time to<br />
be strong criticism of the consumer capitalism and smugness of the<br />
post-World-War-II era.</p>
<p>The Futurian revolt was half-hearted, semi-covert, and easily<br />
absorbed by the Campbellian mainstream of the SF field; by the<br />
mid-1960s, sociological extrapolation had become a standard part of<br />
the toolkit even for the old-school Golden Agers, and it never<br />
challenged the centrality of hard SF.  But the New Wave, after 1965,<br />
was not so easily dismissed or assimilated.  Amidst a great deal of<br />
self-indulgent crap and drug-fueled psychedelizing, there shone a few<br />
jewels &mdash; Phillp Jos&eacute; Farmer&#8217;s <cite>Riders of the Purple<br />
Wage</cite>, some of Harlan Ellison&#8217;s work, Brian Aldiss&#8217;s<br />
<cite>Hothouse</cite> stories, and Langdon Jones&#8217;s <cite>The Great<br />
Clock</cite> stand out as examples.</p>
<p>As with the Futurians, the larger SF field did absorb some New Wave<br />
techniques and concerns.  Notably, the New Wavers broke the SF taboo<br />
on writing about sex in any but the most cryptically coded ways, a<br />
stricture previously so rigid that only Heinlein himself had had the<br />
stature to really break it, in his 1961 <cite>Stranger In A Strange<br />
Land</cite>.</p>
<p>The New Wave also exacerbated long-standing critical arguments<br />
about the definition and scope of of science fiction, and briefly<br />
threatened to displace hard SF from the center of the field.  Brian<br />
Aldiss&#8217;s 1969 dismissal of space exploration as &#8220;an old-fashioned<br />
diversion conducted with infertile phallic symbols&#8221; was typical New<br />
Wave rhetoric, and looked like it might have some legs at the<br />
time.</p>
<p>As a politico-cultural revolt against the American vision of SF,<br />
however, the New Wave eventually failed just as completely as the<br />
Futurians had.  Its writers were already running out of steam in 1977<br />
when <cite>Star Wars</cite> took the imagery of pre-Campbellian space<br />
opera to the mainstream culture.  The half-decade following (my<br />
college years, as it happened) was a period of drift and confusion<br />
only ended by the publication of David Brin&#8217;s <cite>Startide<br />
Rising</cite> in 1982.</p>
<p>Brin, and his collegues in the group that came to be known as the<br />
&#8220;Killer Bs&#8221; (Greg Bear and Gregory Benford), reasserted the primacy of<br />
hard SF done in the grand Campbellian manner.  Campbell himself had<br />
died in 1971 right at the high-water mark of the New Wave, but<br />
Heinlein and Anderson and the other surviving luminaries of the<br />
Campbellian era had no trouble recognizing their inheritors.  To<br />
everyone&#8217;s surprise, the New Old Wave proved to be not just<br />
artistically successful but commercially popular as as well, with its<br />
writers becoming the first new stars of the post-1980 boom in SF<br />
publishing.</p>
<p>The new hard SF of the 1980s returned to Golden Age themes and images, if<br />
not quite with the linear simplicity of Golden Age technique.  It also<br />
reverted to the libertarian/individualist values traditional in the<br />
field.  This time around, with libertarian thinking twenty years more<br />
developed, the split between order-worshiping conservatism and the<br />
libertarian impulse was more explicit.  At one extreme, some SF (such<br />
as that of L. Neil Smith) assumed the character of radical libertarian<br />
propaganda.  At the other extreme, a subgenre of SF that could fairly<br />
be described as conservative/militarist power fantasies emerged,<br />
notably in the writing of Jerry Pournelle and David Drake.</p>
<p>Tension between these groups sometimes flared into public<br />
animosity.  Both laid claims to Robert Heinlein&#8217;s legacy.  Heinlein<br />
himself maintained friendly relationships with conservatives but<br />
counted himself a libertarian for more than a decade before his death<br />
in 1988.</p>
<p>Heinlein&#8217;s evolution from Goldwater conservative to anti-statist<br />
radical both led and reflected larger trends.  By 1989 depictions of<br />
explicitly anarcho-libertarian future societies were beginning to<br />
filter into mainstream SF work like Joe Haldeman&#8217;s <cite>Buying<br />
Time</cite>. Haldeman&#8217;s Conch Republic and Novysibirsk were all<br />
the more convincing for not being subjects of polemic.</p>
<p>Before the 1980s changes in U.S. law that reversed the tax status<br />
of inventories and killed off the SF midlist as a side effect, a lot<br />
of Golden Age and New Wave era SF was pretty continuously in print<br />
(though in sharply limited quntities and hard to find).  I still own a<br />
lot of it in my personal collection of around 3,000 SF paperbacks and<br />
magazines, many dating back to the &#8217;50s and &#8217;60s and now long out of<br />
print.  I read it all; pre-Campbellian space opera, the Campbellian<br />
classics of the Golden Age, the Futurians, the New Wave ferment, and<br />
the reinvention of hard SF in the 1980s.</p>
<p>In some respects, it took me thirty years to understand what I was<br />
seeing.  I&#8217;m one of Heinlein&#8217;s children, one of the libertarians that<br />
science fiction made.  Because that&#8217;s so, it was difficult for me to<br />
separate my own world-view from the assumptions of the field.  In<br />
grokking the politics of SF, I was in the position of a fish trying to<br />
understand water.</p>
<p>Eventually, however, a sufficiently intelligent fish could start to<br />
get it about hydrodynamics &mdash; especially when the water&#8217;s behavior is<br />
disturbed by storms and becomes visibly turbulent.  I got to look back<br />
through the midlist at the Futurian ripples.  I lived through the New<br />
Wave storm and the pre-Startide-Rising doldrums.  By the time cyberpunk<br />
came around, I was beginning to get some conscious perspective.</p>
<p>Cyberpunk was the third failed revolution against Campbellian SF.<br />
William Gibson, who is generally credited with launching this subgenre<br />
in his 1984 novel <cite>Neuromancer</cite>, was not a political<br />
writer.  But Bruce Sterling, who promoted Gibson and became the chief<br />
ideologue of anti-Cambellianism in the late 1980s, called it &#8220;the<br />
Movement&#8221; in a self-conscious reference to the heady era of 1960s<br />
student radicalism.  The cyberpunks positioned themselves particularly<br />
against the carnographic conservative military SF of David Drake,<br />
Jerry Pournelle, and lower-rent imitators &mdash; not exactly a hard<br />
target.</p>
<p>Despite such posturing, the cyberpunks were neither as<br />
stylistically innovative nor as politically challenging as the New<br />
Wave had been. Gibson&#8217;s prose has aptly been described as Raymond<br />
Chandler in mirror-shades. Cyberpunk themes (virtual reality,<br />
pervasive computing, cyborging and biosculpture, corporate feudalism)<br />
had been anticipated in earlier works like Vernor Vinge&#8217;s 1978 hard-SF<br />
classic <cite>True Names</cite>, and even further back in <cite>The<br />
Space Merchants</cite>.  Cyberpunk imagery (decayed urban landscapes,<br />
buzzcuts, chrome and black leather) quickly became a cliche replicated<br />
in dozens of computer games.</p>
<p>Neal Stephenson wrote a satirical finis to the cyberpunk genre in<br />
1992&#8217;s <cite>Snow Crash</cite>, which (with Bruce Sterling&#8217;s<br />
<cite>Schismatrix</cite> and Walter John Williams&#8217;s<br />
<cite>Hardwired</cite>) was very close to being the only work to meet<br />
the standard set by <cite>Neuromancer</cite>.  While most cyberpunk<br />
took for granted a background in which late capitalism had decayed<br />
into an oppressive corporate feudalism under which most individuals<br />
could be nothing but alienated and powerless, the future of <cite>Snow<br />
Crash</cite> was a tellingly libertarian one.  The bedrock<br />
individualism of classical SF reasserted itself with a smartass<br />
grin.</p>
<p>By the time cyberpunk fizzled out, most fans had been enjoying the<br />
hard-SF renaissance for a decade; the New Wave was long gone, and<br />
cyberpunk had attracted more notice outside the SF field than within<br />
it.  The leaders of SF&#8217;s tiny in-house critical establishment, however<br />
(figures like Samuel Delany and David Hartwell), remained fascinated<br />
on New Wave relics like Thomas Disch and Philip K. Dick, or<br />
anti-Campbellian fringe figures like Suzette Hadin Elgin and Octavia<br />
Butler.  While this was going on, the readers voted with their Hugo<br />
ballots largely for writers that were squarely within the Campbellian<br />
tradition &mdash; Golden age survivors, the killer Bs, and newer<br />
writers like Lois McMaster Bujold and Greg Egan (whose 1998 work<br />
<cite>Diaspora</cite> may just be the single most audacious and<br />
brilliant hard-SF novel in the entire history of the field).</p>
<p>In 1994, critical thinking within the SF field belatedly caught up<br />
with reality.  Credit for this goes to David Hartwell and Cathryn<br />
Cramer, whose analysis in the anthology <cite>The Ascent of<br />
Wonder</cite> finally acknowledged what should have been obvious all<br />
along.  Hard SF is the vital heart of the field, the radiant core from<br />
which ideas and prototype worlds diffuse outwards to be appropriated<br />
by writers of lesser world-building skill but perhaps greater<br />
stylistic and literary sophistication.  While there are other modes<br />
of SF that have their place, they remain essentially derivations of or<br />
reactions against hard SF, and cannot even be properly understood<br />
without reference to its tropes, conventions, and imagery.</p>
<p>Furthermore, Gregory Benford&#8217;s essay in <cite>The Ascent of Wonder</cite><br />
on the meaning of SF offered a characterization of the genre which may well<br />
prove final.  He located the core of SF in the experience of &#8220;sense of wonder&#8221;,<br />
not merely as a thalamic thrill but as the affirmation that the universe<br />
has a knowable order that is discoverable through reason and science.</p>
<p>I think I can go further than Hartwell or Cramer or Benford in<br />
defining the relationship between hard SF and the rest of the field.<br />
To do this, I need to introduce the concept linguist George Lakoff calls<br />
&#8220;radial category&#8221;, one that is not defined by any one logical<br />
predicate, but by a central prototype and a set of permissible or<br />
customary variations.  As a simple example, in English the category<br />
&#8220;fruit&#8221; does not correspond to any uniformity of structure that a<br />
botanist could recognize.  Rather, the category has a prototype<br />
&#8220;apple&#8221;, and things are recognized as fruits to the extent that they<br />
are either (a) like an apple, or (b) like something that has already<br />
been sorted into the &#8220;like an apple&#8221; category.</p>
<p>Radial categories have central members (&#8220;apple&#8221;, &#8220;pear&#8221;, &#8220;orange&#8221;)<br />
whose membership is certain, and peripheral members (&#8220;coconut&#8221;,<br />
&#8220;avocado&#8221;) whose membership is tenuous.  Membership is graded<br />
by the distance from the central prototype &mdash; roughly, the<br />
number of traits that have to mutate to get one from being like<br />
the prototype to like the instance in question.  Some traits<br />
are important and tend to be conserved across the entire<br />
radial category (strong flavor including sweetness) while<br />
some are only weakly bound (color).</p>
<p>In most radial categories, it is possible to point out members that<br />
are counterexamples to any single intensional (&#8220;logical&#8221;) definition,<br />
but traits that are common to the core prototypes nevertheless tend to<br />
be strongly bound.  Thus, &#8220;coconut&#8221; is a counterexample to the<br />
strongly-bound trait that fruits have soft skins, but it is sorted as<br />
&#8220;fruit&#8221; because (like the prototype members) it has an easily-chewable<br />
interior with a sweet flavor.</p>
<p>SF is a radial category in which the prototypes are certain<br />
classics of hard SF.  This is true whether you are mapping individual<br />
works by affinity or subgenres like space opera, technology-of-magic<br />
story, eutopian/dystopian extrapolation, etc.  So in discussing the<br />
traits of SF as a whole, the relevant question is not &#8220;which traits<br />
are universal&#8221; but &#8220;which traits are strongly bound&#8221; &mdash; or,<br />
almost equivalently, &#8220;what are the shared traits of the core (hard-SF)<br />
prototypes&#8221;.</p>
<p>The strong binding between hard SF and libertarian politics<br />
continues to be a fact of life in the field.  It it is telling that<br />
the <em>only</em> form of politically-inspired award presented<br />
annually at the World Science Fiction Convention is the Libertarian<br />
Futurist Society&#8217;s &#8220;Prometheus&#8221;.  There is no socialist, liberal,<br />
moderate, conservative or fascist equivalent of the class of<br />
libertarian SF writers including L. Neil Smith, F. Paul Wilson, Brad<br />
Linaweaver, or J. Neil Schulman; their books, even when they are<br />
shrill and indifferently-written political tracts, actually<br />
<em>sell</em> &mdash; and sell astonishingly well &mdash; to SF<br />
fans.</p>
<p>Of course, there are people in the SF field who find this deeply<br />
uncomfortable.  Since the centrality of hard SF has become inescapable,<br />
resistance now takes the form of attempts to divorce hard SF from<br />
libertarianism &mdash; to preserve the methods and conceptual apparatus<br />
of hard SF while repudiating its political aura.  Hartwell<br />
&amp; Cramer&#8217;s 2002 followup to <cite>The Ascent of Wonder</cite>,<br />
<cite>The Hard SF Renaissance</cite>, takes up this argument in its<br />
introduction and explanatory notes.</p>
<p><cite>The Hard SF Renaissance</cite> presents itself as a dialogue<br />
between old-school Campbellian hard SF and an attempt to construct a<br />
&#8220;Radical Hard SF&#8221; that is not in thrall to right-wing tendencies.<br />
It is clear that the editors&#8217; sympathies lie with the &#8220;Radicals&#8221;, not<br />
least from the very fact that they identify libertarianism as a right-wing<br />
phenomenon.  This is an error characteristic of left-leaning thinkers,<br />
who tend to assume that anything not &#8220;left&#8221; is &#8220;right&#8221; and that approving<br />
of free markets somehow implies social conservatism.</p>
<p>All the history rehearsed so far has been intended to lead up to<br />
the following question: is the &#8220;Radical Hard SF&#8221; program possible?<br />
More generally, is the symbiotic relationship between libertarian<br />
political thought and SF a mere historical accident, or is there an<br />
intrinsic connection?</p>
<p>I think I know what John Campbell&#8217;s answer would be, if he had not<br />
died the year that the founders of libertarianism broke with<br />
conservatism.  I know what Robert Heinlein&#8217;s was.  They&#8217;re the same as<br />
mine, a resounding yes &mdash; that there is a connection, and that<br />
the connection is indeed deep and intrinsic.  But I am a proud<br />
libertarian partisan, and conviction is not proof.  Cultural history<br />
is littered with the corpses of zealots who attempted to yoke art to<br />
ideology with shallow arguments, only to be exposed as fools when the<br />
art became obsolescent before the ideology or (more often)<br />
vice-versa.</p>
<p>In the remainder of this essay I will nevertheless attempt to prove<br />
this point. My argument will center around the implications of a<br />
concept best known from First Amendment law: the &#8220;marketplace of<br />
ideas&#8221;.  I am going to argue specifically from the characteristics<br />
of hard SF, the prototypes of the radial category of SF.</p>
<p>Science fiction, as a literature, embraces the possibility of<br />
radical transformations of the human condition brought about through<br />
knowledge.  Technological immortality, star drives, cyborging &mdash;<br />
all these SFnal tropes are situated within a knowable universe, one in<br />
which scientific inquiry is both the precondition and the principal<br />
instrument of creating new futures.</p>
<p>SF is, broadly, optimistic about these futures.  This is so for the<br />
simple reason that SF is fiction bought with peoples&#8217; entertainment<br />
budgets and people, in general, prefer happy endings to sad ones.  But<br />
even when SF is not optimistic, its dystopias and cautionary tales<br />
tend to affirm the power of reasoned choices made in a knowable<br />
universe; they tell us that it is not through chance or the whim of<br />
angry gods that we fail, but through our <em>failure</em> to be<br />
intelligent, our failure to use the power of reason and science<br />
and engineering prudently.</p>
<p>At bottom, the central assumption of SF is that applied science is<br />
our best hope of transcending the major tragedies and minor irritants<br />
to which we are all heir.  Even when scientists and engineers are not<br />
the visible heroes of the story, they are the invisible heroes that<br />
make the story notionally possible in the first place, the creators of<br />
possibility, the people who liberate the future to become a different<br />
place than the present.</p>
<p>SF both satisfies and stimulates a sort of lust for possibility<br />
compounded of simple escapism and a complex intellectual delight in<br />
anticipating the future.  SF readers and writers want to believe that<br />
the future not only can be different but can be different in many,<br />
many weird and wonderful ways, all of which are worth exploring.</p>
<p>All the traits (embrace of radical transformation, optimism,<br />
applied science as our best hope, the lust for possibilities) are<br />
weakly characteristic of SF in general &mdash; but they are<br />
<em>powerfully</em> characteristic of hard SF.  Strongly bound, in the<br />
terminology of radial categories.</p>
<p>Therefore, hard SF has a bias towards valuing the human traits and<br />
social conditions that best support scientific inquiry and permit it<br />
to result in transformative changes to both individuals and societies.<br />
Also, of social equilibria which allow individuals the greatest scope<br />
for choice, for satisfying that lust for possibilities.  And it is is<br />
here that we begin to get the first hints that the strongly-bound<br />
traits of SF imply a political stance &mdash; because not all<br />
political conditions are equally favorable to scientific inquiry and<br />
the changes it may bring. Nor to individual choice.</p>
<p>The power to suppress free inquiry, to limit the choices and thwart<br />
the disruptive creativity of individuals, is the power to strangle<br />
the bright transcendant futures of optimistic SF.  Tyrants, static<br />
societies, and power elites fear change above all else &mdash; their<br />
natural tendency is to suppress science, or seek to distort it for<br />
ideological ends (as, for example, Stalin did with Lysekoism). In the<br />
narratives at the center of SF, political power is the natural enemy<br />
of the future.</p>
<p>SF fans and writers have always instinctively understood this.<br />
Thus the genre&#8217;s long celebration of individualist anti-politics; thus<br />
its fondness for voluntarism and markets over state action, and for<br />
storylines in which (as in Heinlein&#8217;s archetypal <cite>The Man Who<br />
Sold The Moon</cite>) scientific breakthrough and and free-enterprise<br />
economics blend into a seemless whole. These stances are not<br />
historical accidents, they are structural imperatives that follow from<br />
the lust for possibility.  Ideological fashions come and go, and the<br />
field inevitably rediscovers itself afterwards as a literature of<br />
freedom.</p>
<p>This analysis should put permanently to rest the notion that hard SF<br />
is a conservative literature in any sense.  It is, in fact, deeply and<br />
fundamentally radical &mdash; the literature that celebrates not merely<br />
science but science as a permanent revolution, as the final and most<br />
inexorable foe of all fixed power relationships everywhere.</p>
<p>Earlier, I cited the following traits of SF&#8217;s libertarian<br />
tradition: ornery and insistant individualism, veneration of the<br />
competent man, instinctive distrust of coercive social engineering and<br />
a rock-ribbed objectivism that values knowing how things work and<br />
treats all political ideologizing with suspicion.  All should now be<br />
readily explicable.  These are the traits that mark the enemies of the<br />
enemies of the future.</p>
<p>The partisans of &#8220;Radical Hard SF&#8221; are thus victims of a category<br />
error, an inability to see beyond their own political maps.  By<br />
jamming SF&#8217;s native libertarianism into a box labeled &#8220;right wing&#8221; or<br />
&#8220;conservative&#8221; they doom themselves to misunderstanding the deepest<br />
imperatives of the genre.</p>
<p>The SF genre and libertarianism will both survive this mistake<br />
quite handily.  They were symbiotic before libertarianism defined<br />
itself as a distinct political stance and they have co-evolved ever<br />
since.  If four failed revolutions against Campbellian SF have not<br />
already demonstrated the futility of attempting to divorce them, I&#8217;m<br />
certain the future will.</p>
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