Fantasy being progressive coded was a big thing in the 2010's A good case study is the Avatar: the last airbender and the legend of Korra. The shows were made 10 years apart, yet gender norms, gender relations and sexuality are depicted in a massively different way.

Correction, 7 years.

This is basically because I of the weirdly gendered mainstreaming of both the genres

It roughly holds for 'mainstream' or at least major studio examples but then falls apart quickly for the food stuff

The good* stuff

I think it's mostly military sci-fi that has a reputation of being right-wing coded. And that comes down to all the chuds that don't realize you're not supposed to view the Imperium of Man as the good guys.

Or those who saw the Verhoeven adaptation of Starship Troopers and completely missed the not-so-subtle satire of hyper-militarist fascism because co-ed showers.

not really tbh, I'd say there's still a lot of great progressive SF, including most recent SF Hugo nominees and winners

I mean, one problem is that there's all the tech bro chuds who try to pose as people making SF real and all that, but it's not really a noticeable trend when it comes to actual prominent SF fiction; as in, what wins SF awards and all that

It’s not like the tech bro chuds are even reading current science fiction anyway. It’s warmed over recollections of science fiction novels that were reactionary to a varying degree. Though I think Thiel seems like the only person to actually think his politics make sense for Tolkien.

Yeah, Thiel being a tech bro who's big into fantasy, ironically Tolkien of all authors who was very technophobic is ironic. And there's the Italian fascists who are hugely into Tolkien and the hobbits including current PM Meloni.

Does something get lost in the translation here? That’s incredibly strange.

I mean, Tolkien was quite conservative and Catholic, even if he wasn't fascist, it's easy to see how the vision of Shire as a conservative idyll can appeal to them. His conservatism was somewhat unusual and different from today's reaction but they don't care about that.

I think there's also an odd historical contingency thing where the publisher of the Italian translation was also a publisher of esoterica, which tends to have a fash audience and so didn't help.

Like, the most prominent male Sci-Fi authors on the awards circuit are, what, Scalzi and Tchaikovsky? Not exactly bastions of conservatism!

I think that some relatively-recent (~past 30-40 years) Big Names in the genre have exposed themselves as quite conservative and chuddy has dampened the perception of the more recent names some. Like, Scott Card, obviously; Dan Simmons and Richard K. Morgan too. Lots of counter-examples, though.

Yeah but e.g. Card was already largely losing relevance as a SF writer 20 years ago tbh (as per OP), churning out inferior prequels and midquels instead of writing anything interesting

Oh yes. But "no longer relevant, goes online to yell to his platform of middle aged fans about the evils of trans people" is a good way for them to both get attention and make the genre seem more conservative than it is. (c.f. strong association of gamer:chud despite being world's biggest hobby)

Card is more old school and focuses on the evil of gay people more than trans

By 2005 I still read Shadow of the Giant because of sunken cost fallacy but it already felt like a chore and then the next thing Card released was A War of Gifts, an interquel about evil atheists banning Christmas in Battle School and it felt like a good moment to give up on Card and Enderverse

I've only ever read Ender's Game and I feel like that is a blessing at this point

Speaker for the Dead is also worth reading, but open-ended and the sequels after that are increasingly bad

I’ll grant you Simmons and Morgan but even then there’s a lot of left-leaning counterexamples; and I mean, for every Morgan we have William Gibson, a far superior cyberpunk writer AND person

I entirely agree, yes. I'm just saying this is a case of "the old irrelevant chuds are Loud Online so people's perceptions get skewed because they are too online"

(Gibson is vocal online about supporting trans people, for one)

Yes. There's an argument that his writing and his public comments show he has done a great deal more thinking and relating to people than many of his peers in-genre from his generation. (Bruce Stirling is another example, of course)

Ray Nayler (this year’s novella winner) isn’t either

Also James SA Corey (though they're more a commercial than awards success I think)

Expanse books won Hugo for Best Series and got plenty of nominations plus the TV show won 3 Hugos too, so also counts

Some people miss the point of scifi entirely.

I think the problem is not SF becoming more reactionary coded (I'd say the trend in actual prominent SF fiction is the opposite) but reactionaries trying to portray themselves as SF coded becoming a thing

yes, while the fantasy-coded reactionary chuds are now kept in relative silence but they too are out there

I wouldn’t exactly call JK Rowling “kept in silence”

there's always the one exception but tbh i wasn't thinking about authors here but prominent reactionaries self-identifying as fantasy fans

i don't even think she's ever been a self-proclaimed fantasy fan (not least of all because it'd draw attention to all those questions about plagiarism)

Yeah but she’s not just an author but also politically active reactionary billionaire like Musk and Thiel

Or Italian PM Meloni, a huge Tolkien fan, who met with Morawiecki in Poland in a fantasy themed cafe/bar that my Warsaw SFF friends frequent with photo ops in front of Middle-earth map (and there’s Thiel naming all his cyberpunk dystopia shit after stuff from LotR as a crossover)

oh god, i didn't even know about meloni

Identifying as hobbits is a huge thing among post-WW2 Italian fascists www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hob...

ITs an big thing over all in italy for some reson www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HLy...

TIL 😦

While in Germany they have an wird thing for Native Americans.

gods, I saw this and had a violetn flashback to polish Tolkien fandom, esp elendili stuff (we had a panel about it on polcon this year but we didnt get to the real good tea, we need to repeat it as two hour long version)

f2 did a televised thing at paradox cafe as well, I'm crying ;DD

F2?

we called elendili forum "f2" as opposed to hobbiton forum being "f1", because it was the second one (elendili came into existence after one of numerous conflicts with admins of hobbiton)

clearly i've been moving in the wrong circles

That's a really good point!

I'd agree, both genres are much more progressive dominated than they were; I also think that the relative coding of each genre in the past has a lot to do with which bits of each genre you're talking about (and a lot of wishful thinking about whether your favourite one is politically "best").

What really helps here is that since Gene Wolfe died I don't think there are many conservative writers left in either genre (or at least their Anglophone extents) who can actually *write*.

(Also with some authors it can just be hard to read their politics off their work: I can guess from reading Eon [1] that Greg Bear is not a fan of Soviet Communism but frankly, that doesn't really determine that much.)

[1] Good book, largely holds up well, the sequence where nuclear war breaks out is deftly handled and *quite upsetting*, the early sections on the asteroid should be studied by Call of Cthulhu GMs for how to portray constant low level SAN point loss.

And then you have the oddballs whose work is downright misleading about their politics. It still baffles me that a homophobic Mormon could write the original Ender quartet

I don’t like to speculate about homophobes being closeted gays but OSC is such a blatant case (including his article about how homosexuality should be criminalized because otherwise it will be too tempting for men instead of doing their disgusting marital duties with a woman)that I make a exception

I couldn’t make up a more blatant fictional case of a self hating gay man from a religiously fundamentalist community if I tried tbh

when it comes to Russian SF writers, being a fan of the Soviet Union now usually means you're a hardcore reactionary

Unfortunately, that makes a lot of sense. And similarly Liu Cixin's politics are... pretty awful.

i felt like the books were already pretty revealing about his politics (and his views on women)

I had a "hmm" moment when the effeminacy of the peaceful humans on the space station was mentioned, tbh. Apparently the untranslated version is worse.

A lot of Russian SF used to be published in Poland, but a lot of those writers stopped being published here since 2014 and especially 2022 when they went full pro-war on Ukraine. Some are still published here like Glukhovsky, but mostly those who don't live in Russia anymore (he's on a wanted list)

Russia is making things hard for some of their citizens in our countries #freeUkraine

Lukyanenko was pretty big in Poland but after he became very vocally pro-Putin and anti-Ukraine, he's a persona non grata here.

sadly Polish SF AND fantasy have had a major right-wing slant for decades although that too is changing gradually, even if not as fast as in Anglophone fiction.

Orson Scott Card is alive and writing but his output has been crap since even before I *knew* he was a hardcore homophobe, he *used to* be able to write good SF but not anymore.

Oh definitely. I mean I don’t know any of his recent books, but I’ve also stopped reading Card long ago, before I knew anything about him. Each new book was worse then the last. Eventually it became too much even for me.

Similarly I have some time for most early Dan Simmons (side-eyes Song of Kali as a definite exception) but I think Olympos really put me off anything after that.

I liked Ilium but Olympos was a letdown of a conclusion

and tbh fantasy has a bigger JK Rowling problem than SF does with any living writer

I suppose the best you can say there is that she was progressive for the 00s, though that depends on whether or not the brainworms were already there and nobody had noticed as the issue wasn't salient.

Would agree with this. Reactionaries trying to claim the mantle of Asimov and Clarke is a bigger driver of this more than sci-fi authorship tilting towards the hard right

I would hazard a guess that more than one leading member of the AI Bros believes building the AGI Machine God is the path to becoming Hari Seldon and building Asimov's "psychohistory" to outrun society with predictions...

(and I mean, reactionaries in SF has always been a thing but it's become more of a mainstream thing among the right, while at the same time the actual prominent SF fiction moved to the left; the reactionaries are more fixated on the "good old" SF from the "golden age" than what's being written now)

wrong sci-fi hasn’t changed, sci-fi is dead different things sci-fi takes up half a shelf in bookstores now if you’re lucky it’s dead