myrmepropagandist
Many science fiction stories are what we call "cautionary tales." They are called "cautionary" because the things that happen in the story are bad. Part of the reason authors write stories like these is so that we can *avoid* things like that happening.
The stories show how people were short-sighted or made mistakes with technology and science and the horrible things that can happen.
IDK... I just suddenly felt the need to explain this very clearly for some reason.
myrmepropagandist
Even if some of the people in the story are cool, or the mood of the story is cool... it's still a bad thing that the technology went all wrong... I ...
myrmepropagandist
Realizing when you are a kid that you are smarter than some adults is one thing, but a more interesting thing is realizing (when you are a kid) that some of the people who some adults treat like they aren't very smart actually are (and kids can be in this group, you might be in it) is ANOTHER.
It's possible to find people who have only noticed the first concept relatable, but disappointing when you realize that never learned the rest of it.
Wyatt H Knott
@mattmcirvin @nyrath @futurebird Heinlein was opposed to democracy as a technocrat and an intellectual elitist, I've always thought that what people termed a libertarian streak was really an anti-idiotocracy streak. He's pretty explicit in both ST and Friday that democracy without civic restrictions or prerequisites is a recipe for disaster.
Matt McIrvin
@whknott @nyrath @futurebird Yes, Heinlein was an anti-democrat for that reason. He also had a vastly inflated opinion of his own infallibility (judging from his statements on technical subjects I actually know something about), so I never found his position on the desirability of rule by intellectual elites who resembled himself very convincing. And I say this as a fan of a lot of his writing.
It's an attitude that's very common in the science-fiction community, actually. I think it comes from the experience of being precocious kids who realized early on that they were smarter than a lot of the adults around them, which is something a lot of science-fiction fans have had. But it turns out this doesn't map very well to being fit to rule.
Matt McIrvin
@nyrath @futurebird What makes that doubly painful is the knowledge that if the late-era Heinlein were alive today, given where his thinking was going, he'd almost certainly identify today's liberals as the equivalent of Nehemiah Scudder and think of Trump and particularly Elon Musk as liberators. I certainly see plenty of his fans making that kind of leap.
Star Trek: TNG did an episode, "The Drumhead", that was a courtroom parable about a Joe McCarthy-style witch hunt. I recently saw an excerpt from that on YouTube and most of the comments were from people drawing parallels between the villain of the episode and liberal governments supposedly oppressing us with COVID prevention measures, vaccination and "wokeness". The problem with this kind of art is that you can take it just about any way you want.
Winchell Chung ⚛🚀
What really frightens me is Heinlein's description of Nehemiah Scudder in the afterward to his Revolt In 2100...
Winchell Chung ⚛🚀
Agreed.
I was born in the late 1950s and read a lot of science fiction while growing up. Stuff like Nineteen Eighty Four, Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, The Marching Morons, and John Brunner's Club of Rome Quartet.
So my entire life has been watching the world go through a slow motion disaster as each of those novels became true. 🤦♂️
I am waiting with dread for the global spread of Star Trek's Eugenics Wars.
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