Niemeier on the Anti-Mothers
Mr Brian Niemeier has a brief comment on how subversive science fiction has become predictable, uniform, pious, and, in a word, unsubversive.
The Turkey City Lexicon is an index of speculative fiction clichés. Compiled by a venerable group of science fiction authors, the lexicon offers clear examples of what not to include in a sci-fi or fantasy work. Among the list of writing “don’ts” is the innocent-sounding Motherhood Statement.
The lexicon identifies the Motherhood Statement as: “[an] SF story which posits some profoundly unsettling threat to the human condition, explores the implications briefly, then hastily retreats to affirm the conventional social and humanistic pieties, ie [sic] apple pie and motherhood.”
Author Greg Egan claimed that science fiction is most effective when writers “burn the motherhood statement.” His assertion was likely informed by the venerable SF tradition of challenging the status quo
Read it here: http://brianniemeier.com/motherhood-statement/
My comment: when the so called freethinking rebels win, they impose a politically correct uniformity of thought far less free and far less interesting to read and far more preposterously hypocritical than the old established pieties, which at least had experience, common sense, and authentic human emotion on their side, not to mention divine revelation. At such at time the only manly response to the bold nonconformists (all strangely in perfect lockstep with each other!) is to become superversive, and write books upholding not just Motherhood and Apple Pie, but the Virgin Mary and Eucharist.
And the orcs will choke on the wholesome lembas, and spit them out like ashes.
These orcs, in the final analysis, are enemies of humanity, the free market, and freedom; they are the foes of God and Man. For them to claim science fiction as their particular bastion is beyond risible and well into the terrain of the absurd. SFF is the one literature which never will accept the mental uniformity of falsehood these anti-Mothers crave.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
