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Posted by camestrosfelapton

https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2025/07/12/reading-some-reactions/

http://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/?p=53127

Hugo-finalist Jordan S. Carroll has an interesting post at the Los Angeles Review of Books. I suspect most people who read this blog have already read Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness (and if you haven’t, you should), so much of Carroll’s essay will be familiar.

Carroll’s work has very deftly captured the current right-wing obsession with science fiction. That obsession connects many of the figures I’ve covered here with the weird techno-feudalism of the neo-reactionaries and space-the-final-frontier ideology of people like Elon Musk and the tech-bros who strip mine science fiction for what they think are cool concepts but which were intended as dire warnings.

As Carroll notes:

“In recent years, the emergence of techno-fascism out of Silicon Valley and into the White House has made it easier to see the future as a site of struggle. Wealthy and powerful figures such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Palmer Luckey force us to recognize that there is nothing inherently progressive about futurism, including within science fiction. Scholars are thus now coming to grips with reactionary futurism.”

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/reactionary-futurism-2025/

Carroll’s essay does touch on the Sad/Rabid Puppies also and that has engendered the ire of our recurring-blog-topic and notable not-actually-a-nazi Vox Day.

Day has latched on to this paragraph from Carroll’s essay:

“More fundamentally, though, the Far Right believes that the future belongs to them. In much reactionary discourse, only white men have any meaningful ability to imagine the future. According to this worldview, white people possess a racially unique capacity for speculation, including rational planning, counterfactual imagination, and inspired innovation. At the same time, the Far Right claims that only white men have the discipline, intelligence, and foresight to realize this future. This ideology holds that whiteness is a potential for greatness, including the inborn ability to build a high-tech society. In other words, whiteness is speculative to the alt-right: it possesses a promissory value far in excess of any white men’s actual achievements. Some fascist thinkers have gone so far as to suggest that science fiction is an inherently white genre. For example, Theodore Beale (a.k.a. Vox Day), the leader of the Rabid Puppies fan group, claimed that increased racial diversity would ruin the genre because, in his view, people of color could not possibly understand the achievements of white science fiction authors. Despite the widespread success of speculative authors of color in recent decades, there are fascists who hold that nonwhite people are genetically incapable of imagining and inhabiting science-fictional futures.”

ibid

To back up Carroll’s claims here I’ll just wave at ten-years worth of blog posts and a whole 76 chapter Hugo-finalist book which I wrote. However, Day disagrees. In a recent post on his own blog, Day has a 7 point list of objections to this paragraph.

“The future does belong to the so-called “Far Right”. The Left and the Center-Right subscribe to observably and objectively false beliefs, don’t have enough children to replace themselves, don’t have any lasting principles, and can’t even tell the difference between a man and a woman anymore. Their ideas and philosophies are not only bankrupt, they are literally dying out.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20250711203437/https://voxday.net/2025/07/11/correction-6/

To which we should note that Day’s chosen pick for President has a government that is actively undermining maternity medical care in the US (along with health care in general) and also actively undermining America’s vaccination program. I’m not convinced of the long term demographic inevitability of an ideology like Day’s that actively discourages people from taking simple steps to reduce childhood mortality.

I could pick through all seven points but mostly it is Day saying that he is right, that white people are somehow inherently superior and that also he isn’t a fascist. OK, sure, I’ve said I don’t like to be a taxonomic purist so let us just say Day believes white people of Northern European descent are inherently superior and the US should be an authoritarian ethnostate which has been ethnically cleansed of everybody from the Italians southwards (and probably the Irish, I’ll need to check my notes) but MAYBE he isn’t a fascist because, I don’t know, nobody is going to believe (mistakenly) that he would make the trains run on time.

I will do one more point from Day:

“I claimed that increased racial diversity would ruin the genre and I have been proven absolutely correct. There is no objective metric by which it can be claimed that diversity and inclusion have improved it in any way. Fewer readers, lower average advances, fewer book sales, fewer authors published by publishers, fewer bestsellers, and so forth. Diversity and inclusion are not the only cause of the decline, but they have observably contributed to it.”

ibid

Well that does feel like a stronger point, after all people on both left and right have been pointing to a commercial decline not just in science fiction but in literature in general. Maybe it was the woke that did it?

Hmmm, if only we had a way of testing that. Hypothetically, if we were god-like scientists, we would create a comparison group. We would hop back in time to an arbitary point, say 2014, and set up a kind of anti-woke science fiction publisher. “Anti-woke” would be anachronistic so to avoid being spotted as time travellers we’d probably call it “anti-SJW”. Having done all that, we’d just let the clock run forward again.

If Day is right then our comparison group, unburdened by Wokeness, would flourish by bringing diversity free science fiction to the masses!

Coincidentally, how is Castalia House doing at the moment? Very badly and essentially culturally irrelevant? In 2017, Castalia published 20+ books and then after that, at most one or two a year and mainly either Day’s own turgid fantasy series or reprints of John C. Wright.

Meanwhile, there is of course the far more redoubtable Baen Books which has genuinely published some books I wanted to read in recent years and actually spent money on for reasons other than being snarky. Well, Day himself (in big bold letters) says in another post that “Baen Books is Dead”. He’s overstating it but Baen hasn’t found money and glory by tacking rightwards either. On this blog we’ve followed various publishing ventures such Superversive Press or Silver Empire that pitched themselves as antidote to supposed leftwing biases. I’m not mocking their efforts, there are plenty of small press ventures of all viewpoints that start off with ambitions and last a few years and then disappear. My point is simply that this imagined hidden reservoir of right-leaning readers is really a relatively small pool. That audience can support a Larry Correia comfortably, some other authors intermittently but it simply hasn’t been big enough to allow capable writers (Sarah Hoyt, Dave Freer, Brad Torgersen to pick the obvious examples) to make a reasonable living.

In terms of commercial success or even in terms of moderate-success-but-don’t-give-up-the-day-job, left and left-leaning science fiction has far more examples of authors, bigger readership, wider audiences and just way more things happening. Diversity hasn’t turned back the tides that are pushing against publishing but it’s clearly had more commercial success than the opposite and far more critical success and vastly more pop-cultural influence.

That last point is important because that is both the biggest sore point with the right and a constant rallying cry. The repeated conflicts in pop-cultural spaces from major flair ups like Gamergate to the constant lower-level whining about Star Wars or Doctor who or Star Trek or Superman having being ruined by going “woke”, is all centred on this idea that the left has (somehow) gained control of popular culture and are using it to make propaganda for blackgaytransgenderlesbiancommunism.

Stepping away from our old friend Ted, I saw via Bluesky a different response to Carroll’s LARB essay from somebody I don’t know. Entitled “The Priest on the Wall” is has a slightly mocking (and maybe accidentally badass) illustration presenting Jordan Carroll as some kind of fantasy cleric with a spear defending a wall from demonic wolf monsters. Frankly I’m jealous.

Written by Cairo Smith, this is a vastly better response than Vox Day’s. Clearly the writer read the LARB essay and has engaged with the ideas in it. However, I didn’t find the critique convincing.

For example, take this paragraph:

“The defining trait of the right-wing idea space is an almost confounding diversity of thought, as modeled by various researchers, although there are plenty of ingroup and outgroup signifiers that exist at the level of aesthetics. I borrow the term ‘hopeful monsters’ from biologist Richard Goldschmidt to describe this diversity, using it in the Roderick Beaton sense to mean quirky political upstarts that will die off or, rarely, become successful. They are all different from each other, often contradictory, often at odds. The opinions of one cannot stand well for another, since their only real through line is opposition to the mainstream left. Defining them in positivist, generalizable terms in baskets of ‘right’ and ‘far right’ is a difficult errand, but nonetheless it’s exactly what Carroll has endeavored to accomplish.”

https://www.futuristletters.com/p/the-priest-on-the-wall

I could quibble that research linked to doesn’t show what the author thinks it does¹ but there is a genuine sense in which the range of ideas on the right can appear to be confoundingly complex. This isn’t surprising and it is because of some kind of healthy debate of ideas. For example, if you look into communities focused on alternative health you will also find ideas that are “often contradictory, often at odds”. Homeopathy contradicts herbalism but you’ll find people who practice both. It is true that you can’t literally use the opinions of a homeopath to stand for the opinions of a chiropractor but also…you sort of can because, in fact, often the details simply don’t matter. Their real through line is opposition to mainstream medicine but that is actually the point, not whether you can dilute an active ingredient to the point of non-existance and somehow make it more powerful. The same effect can be seen in conspiracy theory circles as well or UFOologist.

Rather than an exciting range of hopeful monsters, the modern US right is caught up in simple contrarianism to the point of folding into itself much of the nonsense from wellness and conspiracy communities. Importantly, what that means is that the modern right has no METHOD i.e. no systematic way of determining what is true (or more likely to be true) from what is false AND increasingly rejects such methods that have developed (logic, empiricism, legal precedent, academic expertise, peer-review, science in general). So, sure, that is an environment in which you can believe six impossible things before breakfast but the ideas that come out of that soup do not survive out of correspondence to truth or practicality but by which voices are the biggest bullies with the most money.

In fact, it isn’t that hard to generalise these views into baskets of right and left because the bulk of the ideas are either just noise or in some cases just conflicting bigotries². Specifically, if we are talking about right-wing science fiction then, yes, Sarah Hoyt has different views than Vox Day, who has different views than Larry Correia and yes, the commonality was that they all wanted to act in opposition to the left. However, that just takes us back to the underlying point. The modern right lacks core, central, compelling ideas and exists primarily to be an opposition to the left and increasingly, almost any idea than with strong empirical backing³.

OK, I’m wandering off topic here but there are some other points I want to pick out.

“You may notice we have strayed a long way from science fiction by now. If tech billionaires aren’t funding homeless services, they certainly aren’t funding esoteric right-wing sci-fi novels, either.”

ibid

I thought this was very interesting statement. In an earlier paragraph, Cairo Smith, talks about some things he thinks Carroll got right. He cites a story from the right wing literary publisher Passage Press that relfects some of the observations Carroll makes about right wing science fiction. Passage Press is the company I wrote about previously connected to Ark Press, Larry Correia’s new publisher, who Vox Day claims is funded by Peter Thiel and which is at least tangentially connected to tech-billionaire Marc Andreessen (see this article by Jason Wilson which has many familiar names in it https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/03/far-right-book-publishing-passage-press ).

Now, I don’t know for certain that there is tech-billionaire money behind Ark Press but…well somebody is paying the salaries for a bunch of editors, book advances and a writing prize and I can’t imagine a regular bank would give anybody money on the grounds of ‘we are going to make lots of money selling science fiction’. On the one hand maybe there is somebody with a lot of money who things science fiction publishing is a sound financial investment, or on the other hand it is somebody with money to burn who has stated that:

““Now it’s either about technology that doesn’t work or about technology that’s used in bad ways. The anthology of the top twenty-five sci-fi stories in 1970 was, like, ‘Me and my friend the robot went for a walk on the moon,’ and in 2008 it was, like, ‘The galaxy is run by a fundamentalist Islamic confederacy, and there are people who are hunting planets and killing them for fun.’ ”

Peter Thiel in 2011 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/11/28/no-death-no-taxes?currentPage=all&mobify=0

In short, I think Cairo Smith mistakes the noise for the message on the right. I think he also underestimates the role of the fringes on popular culture and fiction in general. People will accept more radical politics in their fiction than in their actual lives. Science fiction in particular is often host to ideas more radical (for good and bad) than are mainstream in their current society.

Hey, footnotes!

1. In fact I will quibble about that. The paper is here https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjso.12665 and it doesn’t address a confounding diversity of thought but a different but related idea that ordinary Americans generally on the right has less consensus on social issues than people generally on the left. If you check the associated materials, you can see that they surveyed participants on just 8 issues:
   Item 1) Abortion should be illegal.
   Item 2) The government should take steps to make incomes more equal.
   Item 3) All unauthorized immigrants should be sent back to their home country.
   Item 4) The federal budget for welfare programs should be increased.
   Item 5) Lesbian, gay and trans couples should be allowed to legally marry.
   Item 6) The government should regulate business to protect the environment.
   Item 7) The federal government should make it more difficult to buy a gun.
   Item 8) The federal government should make a concerted effort to improve social and economic conditions for African Americans.
   Republican-leaning participants were more likely to have mixed views on these i.e. it is easier to find a Republican voter who is anti-gay but pro-choice (or vice versa) than a Democrat.
   If you think women, Black people, immigrants, trans-people, gay-people, poor-people and just people in general deserve to have safe happy lives and the government should help make that happen, these are all easy questions to give a quick answer to. If you don’t think that but have a vague sense of both “liberty” and “tradition”, they are hard questions to answer. Of the questions only 2 is overtly left wing, the others all fit within a liberal conception of rights of which only 7 does the “rights” framework work for the right-wing position. ︎
2. For example, there is a very public split between left and the centre on the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza. There is a parallel split on the right but there it a split between those people whose Islamophobia is stronger than their antisemitism and those where it is the other way around but it is still just basically the same underlying bigotry. ︎
3. I’m not trying to imply that leftwing ideas have strong empirical backing. I’m saying those are the two things that the right is positioning itself against. ︎

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Posted by camestrosfelapton

https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2025/07/12/review-murderbot-apple/

http://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/?p=53120

It would have been hard for me not to like this show. During the first episode I was thinking “Do I like this or do I just want to like this?”

A few episodes in and I definitely was really liking it but also feeling very frustrated by the short episodes. Ironically, I think the only episode that suffered by the sit-com length episodes was the final episode. It felt drawn out as the plot dealt with the repercussions of the events while heading towards an ending that would work if the show was not renewed but also be a good launching point for a season 2. The good news is the show has been renewed but I assume that wasn’t know when the final episode was made.

As good as the books? Better? Worse? Or just different?

As I noted in an earlier post on the show, a lot of the appeal in the books was that Murderbot itself is a figure many people identified with. It has no specific gender or ethnicity and no sexuality, which allowed many readers to see aspects of their own personality in Murderbot. TV-Murderbot is less open to this transfer of the reader onto the character. That greater distance between the viewer and Murderbot is bridged by TV-Murderbot being absurdly likeable.

Meanwhile, the Preservation survey team are far more fleshed out as characters in the TV show. To some degree, the implied diversity of the singular book-Murderbot (one character whom many different kinds of people identified with) is reflected in the survey team who, across the story arc, find different aspects of themselves reflected by the oddness of Murderbot. For Gurathin (David Dastmalchian) the similarities between himself and the sec-unit are things he finds confronting.

For the broader group (and in particular Ratthi) there is this initial sense of a forced, unnatural empathy where they are trying to like the sec-unit because they feel a moral obligation to recognise the worth of another sentient being. The show doesn’t suggest they are wrong to do so but it is a notable contrast with how they all are in the final episode. The possible loss of Murderbot as a member of their group is something that strikes them with heartfelt loss.

Everything really did come together very well for the penultimate episode (entitled “All Systems Red” after the original novella. The show was sort of pitched as an action comedy and this episode managed that very well. It was genuinely funny and tense and the ending was deeply moving even though I new everything was going to be fine by the end of the series.

Anyway, a big round of applause all round. They pulled it off. I’m really looking forward to season 2.

As a bonus Reactor has a Murderbot-universe story free to read featuring Perihelion aka ART https://reactormag.com/rapport-martha-wells/

https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2025/07/12/review-murderbot-apple/

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