QotD: The long, slow, lingering death of science fiction

Since its inception around the mid-19th century, SF had always been the literature of promise. It told stories of a universe that was knowable and lawful, in which rational human beings were capable of applying what they learned from it to make life better for everyone. For the most part, the central element was the advance of technology. But the driving ideology was almost always some form or another of socialism.

As we all know, socialism failed. At the height of its popularity it caused widespread starvation and deprivation, wrecking whole economies wherever it was applied. It inspired childish, petulant dictators — idealogues who were eager to do anything except give up an idea that didn't work — to put millions against the wall and send millions more to places like Siberia because the people couldn't (the dictators said "wouldn't") gladly transmogrify themselves into New Collectivist Mankind, or whatever the slogan was at the time. In the end, it finally destroyed the most enormous empire history had ever known.

With every failure of socialism, the promises made by socialist- inspired SF rang more hollow until, sometime in the late 1950s, the genre tried to turn itself inside-out, becoming skeptical of science and technology — instead of junking its broken ideology — becoming increasingly inner-directed and "psychological" as the real world grew more unbearable for disappointed leftists to look upon. Sliding into something resembling nihilism, SF writers lost interest in a future that — however else it might turn out — would not be socialist. And as SF writers lost interest in the future, readers lost interest in SF.

The sweeping nature of this change may have been difficult for the average consumer to notice at first. As literary SF was dying a slow, agonized death on the racks, SF in the movies and on TV appeared to flourish. But it was a narrowly-defined kind of SF, wedged between the anachronistic feudalism of Star Wars and the paramilitary fascism of Star Trek without any room remaining for individuality, let alone individualism.

Exactly like the dictators who were willing to sacrifice millions, rather than give up their precious but unworkable ideology, America's northeastern publishing establishment was willing to let SF die out, rather than give up the socialism of its youth and embrace a new philosophical and political viewpoint that offered real hope for the future.

L. Neil Smith, "New Maps of Bulgaria", Libertarian Enterprise, 2008-11-23