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One thing I worry about is whether the injection of radical politics into science fiction actually has radicalizing impacts, or whether it operates as a kind of immunization.
How many geeks that read eg The Culture novels actually turn into anarchists?
How many geeks that read eg The Culture novels actually turn into anarchists?
I'm uncertain as to the facts one way or the other, and also pessimistic that we can get good evidence. But I'm inclined to suspect that if you introduce anarchism to a street kid they're far more likely to embrace it than if you introduce anarchism to some comfortable nerd.
A lot turns on what it means to *embrace* here. Because I think a lot of nerds are socialized to treat ideas -- including value systems -- very distantly, as *interesting* toys rather than as drivers of motivation and action/struggle.
There's a lot to be said for normalizing anarchist ideas as background radiation, normal people take to ideas and frameworks far faster when they feel there's acceptance or social solidity to them. So there's an argument that injecting radical ideas in geek spaces helps.
But what I worry more generally happens is more akin to folks picking up a shiny toy very quickly and then discarding it, treating radical arguments as entertainment. In such a light, once you've *already seen* anarchism, you get a certain kind of immunization from it.
The argument here is that to adopt *a change in motivation* requires a kind of motivationally driven context, that's something someone in economically desperate conditions talking to an activist has, but it's not something your average nerd just reading a novel has.
Further in the context of science fiction alien or extreme ideas are often jumbled together or utilized haphazardly and lazily, for novelty's sake, not because they're substantive. That means folks generally downgrade the seriousness of novel ideas presented in that context.
I worry that science fiction generally teaches readers to distance themselves from ideas, to delight abstractly the novelty of their construction, rather than be moved by them. Further a good writer is inclined to present ideas in limited or critical forms.
We've had decades of anarchist science fiction authors or authors sympathetically injecting anarchist ideas. And yet almost no one I know in the anarchist scene came here *via* science fiction. At best we're delighted our side habit has some easter eggs for us.
Of course I could be wrong, it could be the case that anarchist or other radical content in SF helps generally pave the way for some more momentous motivational shift from something else. After all anarchists are overwhelmingly a bunch of total nerds (yes, oogles, you too).
