Science fiction started out as a communist-lenient genre. The earliest examples of what would become "science fiction" was stuff like Red Star that was made by people who founded the USSR. How did this genre become co-opted by liberals so fast by the 40s and 50s? You know, even the fascists and reactionaries in the genre limit their imagination to liberal concepts of society like Heinlein.

>>21961709 (OP)

Well there was a backlash to socialism and communism in the U.S. at that time, and apparently the USSR under Stalin began to restrict it too for his church of socialist realism which was concerned with the present. I think a lot of sci-fi skews in a more liberal, progressive, or socialist direction though because a big underlying theme is that the needs of the future society outweigh the present. That goes for dystopian literature too because it implies a dark future based on present trends like the concentration of corporate power or environmental catastrophe. And it's called *science* fiction because it uses a "scientific" (in the loosest sense of the term) method to extrapolate into the future based on present trends. You can't predict the future, but you can find concepts in science fiction that basically "came true" if not quite or not exactly. And that's fundamentally pretty modern, so reactionaries who dislike modernity or even that concept of thinking about the world altogether might prefer Conan's adventures in the Hyborian Age as a preferred form of escapism, which is fun.



Although you have interesting authors who depict sci-fi feudalisms, but those are often more space opera type novels. But even in Dune, that's failing. There is sci-fi like Yoshiki Tanaka who uses the setting to compare/contrast an imperial-type system (flawed as it is) to contrast with the flaws of liberal systems while leaving the reader to think about it and not necessarily taking a side.



One newer book that's interesting is Red Plenty because it takes place in a fictionalized version of the USSR that's similar to the real thing, but is a highly critical take exploring how this attempt to build a better world went awry, which gave Spufford a lot of right-wing American libertarian fans about why "socialism doesn't work," but he's actually a kinda middle-class British socialist of a Christian persuasion although that's not necessarily obvious. It's a video game (albeit a /lit/ one), but Disco Elysium, was written by some highly self-critical Marxists, and part of this theme of exploring the reasons for the failure of 20th century socialism can seem more interesting to people today than throwing more utopian literature onto the pile. Also, not so /lit/, but Atomic Heart is interesting because the futuristic USSR it takes place in is actually rather attractive, it's not a dystopian setting actually, and you can read it in different ways, or you could enjoy it from a variety of political perspectives:



https://youtu.be/bdCqKajLhIM [Embed]
