Over at Hit & Run, there's a link to this piece by David Weigel in the LA Times, which basically consists of Weigel sneering his way past some science fiction books and graphic novels:
These aren't my fantasies or nightmares. All of these vignettes are ripped from science fiction thrillers that have hit shelves in just the last 18 months. Sharia comes to the United States in Robert Ferrigno's potboiler, "Prayers for the Assassin." In Joel C. Rosenberg's "Last Jihad" trilogy, a steel-spined U.S. president nukes Baghdad, then combats a Russo-Iranian axis, all in fulfillment of Scripture (or so we're told in the nail-biting third book, "The Ezekiel Option"). Hannity and his stone-jawed sidekick, G. Gordon Liddy, battle the Clinton restoration in Mike Mackey and Donny Lin's comic book, "Liberality for All." The Second American Civil War is breaking out in Orson Scott Card's "Empire" (book out now, video game on the way).
If it all sounds a little strange and crazed, that's because it is. ...
... the new genre of culture war and terror war novel is different. In "Prayers for the Assassin," an awful and believable event — coordinated nuclear attacks on American cities, with Israeli terrorists framed as the culprits — kick-starts a future that's too ridiculous to be fearsome. Egged on by Hollywood celebrities, millions of Americans convert to Islam. Families haul their kids to the thrill rides at Palestine Adventures. Battleships are renamed for Osama bin Laden. It sounds like satire, but here's the funny part: Ferrigno is serious.
I haven't read any of the novels in question, so maybe they are, in fact, terrible books. No idea. But Weigel's underlying point, that in a science fiction story, the presence of a wonky political premise somehow invalidates the entire novel is just... bizarre. Set aside the notion that, in the context of science fiction novels we suddenly require externally valid suppositions, but even more strange is the notion that strong political slant is somehow some malignant innovation of the right-wing. Based on what he's written here, we can safely assume he hasn't picked up, say, The Handmaid's Tale.
What prompted this all is that, just this evening, I started reading Robert J. Sawyer's Mindscan
. Sawyer, for those who don't know of him, is Canada's most successful science fiction writer, having penned more than a dozen novels, winning both the Hugo and the Nebula (the most prominent awards in the genre). I really enjoy Sawyer's books (well, his stand-alone stuff - I've developed some sort of allergy for his trilogies); greatly enjoy them, in fact. But, to put it mildly, I find his politics infantile. He rocks the sort of statist, pacifist, left-liberal, Trudeaupian view of the world that, on a political level, I find hard to stomach. And he's not shy, at all, about sprinkling his writing with his politics. And that has no impact on the quality of his books, or the enjoyment I derive from them. Nor should it. Which is why Weigel's piece is so inexplicable: if any form of literary expression can stand to play with a bit of political derring-do, it should be sci-fi. Permit me an example: by page 34 of Mindscan, set in 2045, we've been hit with the following:
When I'd been a teenager, I didn't care about money. In fact, I agreed with most Canadians that the profits made by big corporations were obscene. Even in supposedly egalitarian Canada, the rich were getting richer and the poor poorer, and I'd hated it.
...
Many of tonight's potential customers were probably Americans. Immortex had found a much more congenial legal climate for its services in increasingly liberal Canada than in ever-more-conservative America. When I'd been a kid, college students used to come over to Ontario from Michigan and New York because the drinking age was lower here and the strippers could go further. Now, people from those two states crossed the border for legal pot, legal hookers, legal abortions, same-sex marriages, physician-assisted suicide and other things the religious right frowned upon.
As I said, that's just up to page 34. On page 35, we learn that Pat Buchanan has served at least one term as US president. David Weigel thinks the books he's read had "crazed" assumptions? Puppy ain't seen nothin' yet. There's an awful lot of presumptious statements of fact, naive assumptions and flat-out politicking in the quotes I've provided from Sawyer, which I won't go into. But those doesn't matter - they can't, or else the notion of a criticism of literature as distinct from politics makes no sense. It's nice that Weigel thinks the politics of the books he's read are moronic - it'd be much nicer if he took some time to talk about the value of the books themselves.