Fairly long ago, I realized that I would not have been an apostle had I been in Peter or John's shoes - I'd have heard that weird guy and gone back to my nets, shaking my head at him.

Without a doubt, I'd have been a Tory - and to this day, I'm not actually all that sure that the Tory's weren't more right than the rebels...

I certainly would have been a Federalist, and probably a Whig (though I'd have wanted to go to the Democrat's parties), and I'm pretty sure I'd have been a Free Soiler and then a Union Republican...

But still, it's a pretty jarring day when you realize you'd have probably lined up against the Founding Fathers you've always idolized...

I'd say, don't be too sure. Of any of those. You're not a disciple type here and now, but you are living the good life here and now. Imagine you are poor and frustrated, and your country is under the heel of a brutal foreign power, and you've been raised on religious stories of deliverance from Egyptian tyranny, and the establishment of the Kingdoms of David and Solomon. The Son of Man might have looked very different to you...not weird at all.

Likewise, a lot of Americans were Tory types, until they got mugged by reality. George Washington dreamed of being a British officer, until he discovered that they considered colonials to be trash...

I scorn those people who imagine that if they'd been Elizabethans they would have revered the sublime genius of Shakespeare. That's just stupid. On the other hand, there's a good chance they would have been among Will's fans--but just not in any of the ways we think of him now.

You're one of the few people I've come across who is as frustrated by anachronism in science fiction as in the other fictional genres. C.S. Lewis was another -- he objected to what he called "detective stories in outer space" (I don't have the exact quote, that would mean getting up and going into the other room to look it up and I'm too lazy, but it was something like that.) Another one was science fiction writer (and crazy communist, alas) Joanna Russ, who got into science fiction because (again, I paraphrase -- this is from a book I don't own) in science fiction "things could be different. Of course, these two people went down widely divergent roads because of that realization -- and I never could get into Russ' scifi, which was more of the political polemicizing and attempts to remake the modern world instead of imagining a real, foreign-to-this-time future world for me -- but they both illustrate why I got into science fiction, and then have mostly gotten out of it. I now read very little, and almost nothing new -- I mostly read the old scifi books I have. A favorite author of mine is Andre Norton -- at the height of her writing her worlds and characters had enough of that "non-earthling" flavor as well as the ability to still draw the reader into the predicaments depicted in her stories.

I could go on and on about how science fiction has mostly been hijacked by either the tiresome political correctness of the left (all those fantasies with female characters who are just as good if not better than the male characters, the deus-ex-machina shortcuts of giving women psychic powers that get that tiresome physical difference out of the way, the boring way most of the men except the chosen love interests are all womyn-hating misogynists straight out of a Ms. polemic, all givernments are crushing and oppressive rightwing capitalist regimes while the heroic native peoples (who are all egalitarian, all six sexes of them) live in simple, wholesome, communist-tribal groupings, etc.), or the crass need to break into a lucrative market that results in the aforementioned "detective story (or romance, or political thriller) in space."

Something related that's very much on my mind is that my favorite SF writers are all people of my generation, and they all seem to have hit a wall in recent years. (Which fits in with my thinking that a whole bunch of people of my "baby-boomer" generation have hit a wall, and are become rather crazy as a result.)

I'm thinking of John Crowley, Michael Swanwick, Greg Bear and Eleanor Arnason.

Of course I'm no expert on SF, and any of them could be penning a knock-my-socks-off masterpiece right now. But there are no signs of it. And they all have the flavor of people who have absorbed a certain sort of conventional liberal thinking in their 1060's-'70's youth. And at least two of them have taken to defending lefty pieties in a blatant way that I think they would have been above in the past.

I read Norton as a teenager, and was left with some vague memories of scenes of spooky otherworldliness that I cherish. In fact I've never wanted to go back to her lest I discover that she wasn't really as good as I thought...

Well, I think part of your problem is that science fiction— or fantasy, or whatever— has to be about today in order to find an audience. I don't mean politically similar or whatever, I mean that the reader has to be able to ixdentify with the characters to a certain degree in order to enjoy the book.

I could write a totally alien science fiction novel right now, with values that are entirely different from anything we know, and it wouldn't sell. I mean, look at the work of absurdists— they have a very limited audience, and a truly alien perspective would be even stranger.

Yeah, you are unusual. But everyone likes to have a little flavor of otherness.

Hmm. Have you read C.J. Cherryh? You might try Forty Thousand in Gehenna.

I may try the Cherryh. I like her Foreigner series, though I confess that they are what I read when I don't want to be challenged. Bland food for when I'm feeling under-the-weather.

I read something else by her, where all the action was between alien races, with only one human in the story! I loved that change from the usual requirement to always put humans at the center of whatever. But I didn't find her style charming.

I suspect I want otherness not for its own sake but because it forces us to confront what we really are. And I'm sure I partly like it just because I'm my beliefs are counter-cultural to the CW. And i'd hate to be an SF writer right now, because I think we are living in a SF story stranger and scarier than anything that's ever been penned. Think of the ongoing spiritual and demographic collapse of Europe (that favorite theme of mine). Who would have dreamed that peace, prosperity and democracy would, in the space of a few decades, destroy some of the greatest and most powerful nations in human history?

It's beyond bizarre, beyond any nightmare ever imagined. Who needs SF?

John,

I suppose "peace" could be defined in several different ways, but I think it's more than just "an absence of physical violence". I think that the various European governments are, in effect, in a state of war with their own peoples. How else to explain the prevalence of policies that are hostile, or anti-human, to the point of making their citizens decide not to have children?

Andrea,

I think I suggested it to you (or maybe to John?) once before, but I find the "Honor Harrington" series by David Weber to be a lot of fun. Very human, and certainly not PC. The only drawback is their similarity (which the author acknowledges in a sly way in the story) to the "Horatio Hornblower" books by C.S. Forester-- sometimes the parallels want to make you groan in pain, even if on some level they're humorous.

"Who would have dreamed that peace, prosperity and democracy would, in the space of a few decades, destroy some of the greatest and most powerful nations in human history?"

Anyone who's read any history. C'mon, John, you know better than that! Also there's a little bit of philosophy that people seemed to used to know, that was so basic to our belief system that we took it for granted that everyone else thought this way, that we seem to have lost: the idea that the human race can't take too much peace and prosperity and comfort, that they need a little bit of danger, or at least challenge, to keep from sliding into decadence and finally into barbarism. This was the major theme behind the original (and Only) Star Trek (the theme of the later series were things like "diplomacy is best" -- the Next Generation -- "war is hell, and people suck" -- DS9 -- "no matter where you go, there you and your idiot roommates are" -- Voyager), as well as behind most of the popular television and fiction. Think of the stock figure of the rich man with too many toys vs. the hero, usually either a working class stiff or if rich, involved in something like detective work because the mere life of a rich playboy isn't enough.

But nowadays the themes seem to be "love=sex and the highest goal is finding someone you want to have sex with for the rest of your life," or "he/she who gets the most toys wins a stem-cell treatment that will make sure they live forever and look great as well." We're in the decadent stage now, and it will take something drastic to shock us out of it, I'm afraid.

Well, I knows about decadence. Been there, done that. But we're talking mere decades here!

West Germany in say 1960, was to outward appearances, hard-working, economically vibrant, Christian, confident, with a rapidly growing population and lots of young people. Experts were saying that we Americans had better pull up our socks or be totally out-classed.

And that's all gone! All of it. The corpse is still walking but nobody's fooled except those who want to be fooled. we're not talking decline-of-the-Roman-Empire here, these guys went from heroes to bums in not much more than a generation. If that's happened before in history I really missed something. Fill me in.

(I would actually argue that the real rot was visible at least 200 years ago, in the decline of faith. But as far as stuff you can measure goes, the recent change is off the charts.)

Just off the top of my head I'd say it's due to a combination of the quite sudden (in historical terms) advances in technology -- which have far outstripped any sociological advances the human race has made or is capable of making, and the rise of the welfare state. On the one hand, at least in this country, it is pretty much impossible to starve to death unless you work at it. If you have no job you can get money or welfare. If you are "unable to work" (a category with an ever-expanding criteria) you can get disability. (Note: it is much easier to starve if you are too proud to go begging the government for money.) It used to be that welfare was reserved for orphans and widows, and then with the best of intentions -- always -- it was expanded to meet the needs (supposedly temporary) of unwed mothers, and then it didn't take long for men to figure out that they could just parasite off one or more "girlfriends" and thus have plenty of money left over for street corner malt-liquor tastings and other important activities. (Yes I realize this takes two and that the women who let men do this to them are as much to blame for their predicament.) The end result is the disgusting spectacle of a fully grown and apparently healthy man in post-Katrina New Orleans sitting next to a rather nice barbecue grill fully laden with stolen meat complaining to the news cameras about how he and his neighbors had "been abandoned" because the government didn't forcibly remove them from their below-sea-level neighborhoods before the hurricane.

Welfare is my candidate too, for proximate cause. And Europe has a lot of insidious forms of welfare, more than we do. Such as taking your aged parents off your hands. Or making it impossible to get fired.

Still I can't help thinking there's more going on, because there are no counter-movements over there. No anti-bodies. At least not big enough to appear on my radar. (There's that French anti-union girl, but she's pretty clearly too little and too late.)

Here we've had politically-significant numbers of people shouting STOP all along. And Welfare Reform, in the 90's, cut our welfare rolls in half.

Europe seems happy to just toddle off to bed. Death-bed. Cameron, the British Conservative leader, just suggested Britain should copy France with a 35-hour work week! That made me want to puke.

I'm thinking about your "no anti-bodies" thing...I mean, something like a fifth of France digs Le Pen, but he's a Holocaust-denying anti-semite, wondering if the gas chambers really existed, and observing how his enemies are controlled by the Jews...he's anti-left, sure, but seems to me more a sign of the philosophical bankruptcy of the nation than a counter-culture.

But still, I'm hesitant to say there's an absence of evidence for something in a nation whose politics I don't follow very closely, or to agree when you admit that the standard for viable antibodies is appearing on your radar...obviously no offense intended, of course, but that just seems dubious.

Oh, I'm sure there is a lot more going on. But I don't know enough to comment on the European situation.

" the standard for viable antibodies is appearing on your radar"...

No offense taken, Ethan. In this particular case I think my radar is reliable because this is something I'm very interested in. And more importantly, a lot of other bloggers are interested, and so any slight signal is going to be amplified, and be much less likely to be missed. One doesn't need to follow the news from Europe directly, because other people are doing it, and passing these things along...

By the way, the French gal is Sabine Herold