Well aparently the ass-monkey who wrote that book thinks that the American public would elect such a man as president. I think that we would all agree that that will NEVER happen. But I guess that such fantasies will occur when you sit in a dark and lonely corner, masturbating to a picture of Bill "Slick Willie" Clinton.

When I encounter that kind of political foolishness in fiction, I close the book or eject the DVD. I know from experience that the rest will be a quagmire.

Even if I am willing to suspend disbelief, I won't be able to do it. I'll doubt the author's imaginary world because I'll doubt his grasp on the real one. I'll question the stakes. The liberal CIA agent might lose his job? Awww. The UN might collapse? Ooops. The Maureen Dowdish journalist might not get her man? Lucky guy.

Bad liberal fiction can be instructive, if you can stand it. I recommend The American President to anyone who wants to laugh at their emotional and intellectual immaturity. I hear it's John Lanning's favorite movie.

Nah, Debbie Does Dallas is my favorite movie (just joking). I haven't seen that movie, it must have slipped under the radar for me. Then again, I don't go to the theaters very often. The same moviemakers seem to regenerate the same crap, or worse, and charge $7.00-$12.00 so that they can pay a no-talented ass-clown $20 million dollars to make the crap. Not to mention, these same studios made horrendous garbage such as Gigli, From Justin to Kelly, and Soul Plane.
There are some ultra-rightists that print the same doom and gloom crap as well. Does anyone know of the book "The Turner Diaries"? The author is a white supremicist name Richard Butler, who died last year. The book actually details a race war in the US that ends with the destruction of the UN and an atomic bomb exploding in Israel. The book also includes a part in which white terrorists destroy the FBI building with a furtilizer bomb, a blue-print used by McVey to destroy the federal building in Oklahoma City.
So far, the only KKK member in government is Mr Richard Byrd, a Democrat! And these "Affermative Action" programs that "benefit" minorities are actually racist programs that don't benefit anybody.

Actually, I'd say it's good fiction (as mass-market SF goes) with some bad politics.

And I suspect the author is groping for something he doesn't dare admit consciously. (Yes, yes, it's foolish to speculate about an author based on partially reading one book.) But the one character we follow back on Earth has horrid problems with her childen going off into culty post-modernist weirdness, NOT with them becoming conservatives or Christian fundamentalists. And she herself is an exemplar of a person who has lost the belief that space exploration or science can do any good, with Chernobyl or Challenger as examples of where they lead to.

And in fact the President is described as a "fundamentalist," but Christianity never gets mentioned. The book seems to be about the loss of faith, faith in "science," which is a code-word for a sort of rationalist religion where life gains meaning and purpose from things like space exploration, or engineering, or rationally managing problems with government programs...

Baxter is a known Leftist, and it colors everything he writes. I read two of his novels, Voyage and Titan, and found them so depressing I swore never to read anything else by the man.

Pity. A lot of what he writes is very good science fiction. Of course, I have never read any of his "close future" stories. The closest in time I've read is the Manifold series, a series in which he takes the same characters and puts them in wildly different universes— in one, a new moon appears in the sky, doing crazy things to the planet, on another hyper-intelligent children start appearing, leading to problems for everyone. But since they're set in alternate realities, and politics doesn't really play a role, there's no disconnect.

Some of his work is depressing, true, but I find much of it engaging, especially Vacuum Diagrams, a collection of loosely related short stories with a frame. And for really depressing, try Brunner at his darkest, though his more upbeat novels can be very hopeful (such as Crucible of Time.)

(Brunner is the guy who wrote Stand On Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up. That doesn't mean he necessarily believed them.)

G'day,

I enjoy most of Baxter's books, even the depressing ones. Part of the fun is finding out how he destroys
the Earth.

However he does have an excuse. Remember he is an Englishman. Not an American. His views are pretty much standard for lefty Poms.

ta

Ralph

"Some of his work is depressing"?

So far the only non-depressing Stephen Baxter book I've read is _Silverhair_, and that still had more than its share of depressing moments.

With everything else, either the subject matter is depressing beyond belief (what's his average number of infanticides per book, anyway?) or he takes happy subject matter (e.g. humanity's immortal descendants suriving to the end of the universe, eventually turning all mass-energy towards the purpose of computation to simulate any imaginable activity) and write about it as unhappily as possible. (Oh, no! A finite state machine can only be in one of a gazillion factorial possible states, so after you've done everything humanly imaginable there'll be nothing left to do but repeat yourself! It'll be almost one trillionth as bad as having to watch a rerun!)

I've read four or five of his books, and am still looking for more I'd like, but if he wasn't such a good writer in most other respects I would have thrown away the first Baxter book I picked up - I wouldn't have even made it past the chapter where his villians started plotting to nuke schoolchildren.

What does a leftist author have to be joyful about? All of his gods have crashed. The world moves increasingly away from his vision. All he has for consolation are his shattered idols and a keyboard. Going insane would be a mercy. It's getting there that he imposes on our composure.