Heinlein, Hugos, and Hogwash
The Intercollegiate Review is a print magazine and daily site for conservative students. You’ll hear from leading voices in the conservative movement, get activist tips from top student leaders, learn how to thrive in the face of the liberal campus culture, and more.
They were kind enough to solicit from me one of my better articles, never before seen, and particularly apt at the present time:
When the genre known for its dystopian fiction, tales of thought control, censorship, and mass conformity, begins to exhibit the traits it supposedly deplores, what is a writer of integrity to do? John C. Wright provides an insider’s exposition
http://www.intercollegiatereview.com/index.php/2014/05/07/heinlein-hugos-and-hogwash
Robert Heinlein could not win a Hugo Award today.
If you are a fan of science fiction, you know how shocking that statement is. If you are not a science fiction fan, I salute you for having better things to do with your time than read stories about space princesses being rescued from bug-eyed monsters by stalwart and clean-limbed fighting men of Virginia; but please let me explain why this is shocking.
Robert Heinlein is without doubt the leading writer in the science fiction field. He was the first to break into the slick magazines or into hardcover. Were it not for him, science fiction would still be languishing in a literary ghetto, no more popular than niche-market stories about samurai or railroad executives.
He was a gadfly. Heinlein’s two most famous novels are Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land. The first challenges the orthodoxy of the Left as much as the second does the Right. But in his day, few science fiction readers were offended by his or anyone’s ideas. Science fiction was proud to be a literature of the new and startling. A spirit of intellectual fearlessness was paramount.
A darker time followed. The lamps of the intellect were put out one by one, first in society at large, then in literature, then in our little corner called science fiction. What we have now instead is a smothering fog of caution, of silence, of an unwillingness to speak for fear of offending the perpetually hypersensitive.
Science fiction is under the control of the thought police.
Read the rest here: http://www.intercollegiatereview.com/index.php/2014/05/07/heinlein-hugos-and-hogwash
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.
