Locus Magazine

American vs. British SF, Revisited

by on May 1, 2010 @ 12:22 am

in Aristotelian Liberalism, Science Fiction and Fantasy

A while back I published a blogpost here about the individualist American strain of SF and the more cosmological perspective of the British strain. I just published and expanded and revised version at The Libertarian Standard, working in more explicit libertarian observations.

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Arthur C. Clarke must never have read Mises and Rothbard…

by on January 15, 2008 @ 9:20 pm · 2 comments

in (Austrian) Economics, Libertarianism, Science and Technology, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Statism

[Updated version at Prometheus Unbound and The Libertarian Standard.]

…because according to this quote cited by Gregory Benford in his happy-birthday letter in Locus Magazine (January 2008), he claims that “there are some general laws governing scientific extrapolation, as there are not (pace Marx) in the case of politics and economics.” Well, far be it from me to disagree that Marx was wrong about a lot of things, but Clarke is wrong here. Sir Clarke, you may be 90 years old now, and happy birthday by the way, but it’s never too late to acquire a firm grasp of sound economic theory.

Benford does report some remarks by Clarke I do agree with, however. For example: “for the one fact about the Future of which we can be certain is that it will be utterly fantastic.” Sounds more American than British to me.

And here’s another: “exact knowledge is the friend, not the enemy, of imagination and fantasy.”

Finally, here’s one that evokes, for me at least, the evils and waste of statism: “All this effort, all this death, when we could be building the staging area for a seaborne space elevator.”

Update: In his May 2008 memorial letter for Clarke, Benford adds two more quotes that I like:

“There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.”

“New ideas pass through three periods: It can’t be done; it probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing; I knew it was a good ideal all along!”

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American vs. British SF

by on December 19, 2007 @ 9:06 pm

in Featured Posts, Libertarianism, Science Fiction and Fantasy

[Update: A revised and expanded version of this post has been published at The Libertarian Standard.]

Are there any major differences between American and British SF? If so, what are they and what is the reason for them?

In the latest issue of Locus Magazine (Dec 2007), reviewer Graham Sleight says a couple of interesting things about the differences between American and British SF:

One of the interesting tensions in [Greg] Bear’s work is between the American and British strains of SF. Broadly (and here I’m borrowing from Brian Stableford’s The Scientific Romance in Britain (1985)), British SF derives from the scientific romance tradition of Wells and Stapledon, in which protagonists observe (often in wonder) but do not change the world. In American SF, they do, and the future is something to be worked on, conquered, perhaps owned.

I definitely have a greater affinity for the American strain. The British strain seems to lend itself well to cynical or satirical dystopian stories; the American strain more likely to be hopeful and productive of a libertarian future. Ayn Rand’s Anthem is a dystopian novella with a distinctly American ending.

In a sense, [Alastair] Reynolds’s book [Revelation Space (2000)] should be seen here as emblematic of what other British writers have been doing recently: taking the props of American SF and putting a distinctive dark perspective on them. …. The end of the book opens up the sort of cosmological perspectives one associates with Stapledon (or Baxter), but does so in a story where individual actions make a difference.

I’m not a huge fan of the cosmological perspective stories in which individual actions don’t make much difference. They’re dreadfully pessimistic and dark. And while a cosmological perspective, used in moderation, can offer us a wider perspective on the present, it is a mistake to think that this perspective is primary for telling/showing us what is really important and valuable. I think some SF authors make this mistake. Is it a distinctively British one?

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