Taskmaster The Podcast - Starship Stormtroopers: Fascism in Fiction

Episode Date: October 2, 2022

We had an (in-person!) conversation about Michael Moorcock's 1977 essay about the prevalence of reactionary politics in science fiction and fantasy.  We work through his arguments, examples, and get annoyed that he's calling us out, specifically. The lesson: be more critical of the media you valorize.patreon.com/swordsandsocialismFollow the show @SwordsNSocPodEmail us at [e-mail]: @Himbo_AnarchistKetho: @StupidPuma69 patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @MusicalPuma69

🎵 Bro. Are you fucking real, man? Come on. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism, a podcast about the politics and themes hiding in our genre of fiction. As always, I'm Darius, and with me is Ketho. How's it going? Howdy. This time in real life.

Believe it or not, we both exist IRL, and today we're having a special recording because we're doing it in person. This never happens. I literally had to drive all the way to Ohio to make this happen. Yeah, no one ever wants to do that. I had to go past a billboard that said, all babies cry, take a break, don't shake. So I came into the state and the first thing I saw was the billboard telling you not to shake your babies. I mean, good advice, but troubling that it needs to be said.

Remind Ohioans, don't shake your children to death. It's troubling that it needs to be said. Remind Ohioans, don't shake your children to death. But today we're doing an in-person recording and we are talking about a not book. This is one of the maybe second or third time we've actually talked about what is like an essay as opposed to a book. Well, first essay we did was on fairy stories. It's true. Yeah, that was an essay.

Maybe our second essay. Maybe second. I mean, I guess Omelas technically counts as a story. Yeah, Omelas might just be like a prose essay. Yeah, more or less. But today, we are talking about Michael Moorcock's 1977 essay, Starship Stormtroopers. Where he calls a lot of people out. It is, yeah. I mean, this is no different than like, was it that like Kendrick verse on the Big Sean song where he just calls out every other rapper alive and says he's better than all of them?

This is basically that, but for calling every other sci-fi author fascist. Oh, yeah. It's kind of funny, actually. So I'm going to say going into into it it's not very long if you haven't read it before this recording you can pause this read it in like 10 to 15 minutes yeah it's super it's super short and it's on libcom yeah so really easy to find like just google it the first link is libcom.org um so i'm gonna say off the bat don't, I'm conflicted when I read this because on the one hand, I think he's generally right about a lot of what he says in this essay. I think he's correct.

if that is him actually going a little too far, or if I'm simply annoyed that he has called me out to my face about my media literacy. Yeah. So I was about to say, it's really, there is a decent chunk of this. Just like, Hey,

radical fans of Tolkien. Fuck you. A lot of this is him literally looking me in the eye and going, be more critical of your media. You piece of shit. How can you like this author? He's, he's he's his his politics are bad and moorcock is very much in this essay doing a it's not even you have to separate the art from the artist because his whole argument is that even the art is fashier than you think it is yeah and that we all lack the critical thinking or don't engage in it enough to understand that the art we're consuming is fash yeah i think is

sort of his deal here fash i'm just gonna say a lot because fascist is two syllables and i don't want to say all those um but i mean some of them you'd think it would be obvious like people were like where he's like calling out heinlein and it's like you know Starship Troopers is obvious that's why he named the thing Starship Storm Troopers because he also calls out Star Wars directly in this essay as well that too but I I think what he's more responding to with Heinlein is that I don't think he thinks people read Starship Troopers and are confused by it i think he's calling out quote you know so-called radicals for really enjoying like stranger in a strange land or moon is a harsh mistress and like sort of forgiving heinlein those things yeah when we shouldn't

what we're going to do since this is pretty short is we're essentially going to go through like one or two paragraphs at a time and just kind of talk about the ideas he's presenting to us in these. So as we like, because it's easier to sort of just go through it in the order he presents things because he does ramble a little bit. But this is also a thing he admits he's been complaining about for a while. And that people just haven't been listening. Yeah, and people haven't been listening. So he's very much like, this is my rant. Listen to me.

And this, again, this came out in 1977. So I want you to keep that in mind when you first publish me and this again this came out in 1977 so i want you to keep that in mind when he first published this um yeah this came out 1977 that's so just so everyone remembers that's the year that star wars came out yes which he's going to talk about specifically but also you can't be like oh he doesn't know about the way they treat the force and fucking this extended universe thing those weren't written yet yeah none of that stuff was written um so he didn't i we'll get to that we'll get to that okay so the the first paragraph kind of just outlines exactly what he's going for here which is like the thesis statement where a lot of these things are really fash and he's really confused that,

um, that some so-called radicals who belong to the Monday club are, um, are reading reactionary, reactionary lit. Um, he also isn't as safe. You guys read it.

He does name drop a bunch of authors you've never heard of. Um, because unfortunately their work has, you know, not remained popular. He also named drops a bunch of like sci-fi like magazines like the type of magazines that were popular in like the 50s 60s and 70s where sci-fi authors would like publish their stories yeah and those are those are really curious that's something i actually am really curious about looking into because um he he had his own, and he mentions it in here.

And it got really controversial to a lot of science fiction fans because it wasn't as fashy as the rest of science fiction. He does bring up in here because he talks about them trying to oppose the war in Vietnam. Yeah, and how complicated that was. Yeah, the authors who were part of that journal had split opinions on it, and some of our authors we like are definitely on the wrong side of that issue yeah definitely um so this first sentence i'm going to read it to you because i think it really gets to the heart of this is there are still a few things which bring

a naive sense of shocked astonishment to me whenever i experience them a church service in which the rituals of dark age superstition are performed without any apparent sense of incongruity in the participants. A fat Soviet bureaucrat pontificating about bourgeoisie decadence. A radical singing the praises of Robert Heinlein. A naive sense of shocked astonishment. A radical singing the praises of Robert Heinlein. That's, yeah. um radical singing the praises of robert heinlein that's yeah um he then uh says he would be you know he compares um he compares someone reading something like starship starship troopers with

like enjoyment on a train as him being across from someone reading mind comp with enjoyment and he's like what the let's be honest he goes a little further than that. What he says was, if I saw people in the tube reading Mein Kampf, it wouldn't disturb me much more than if I saw them reading Heinlein, Tolkien, or Richard Adams. Yeah, this is him swinging out the gate. Dude comes out the gate swinging, saying if he sees someone reading Tolkien, that's about as shocking to him as someone reading Mein Kampf. This is the thing that always kind of made me laugh a little bit when people are like, because a lot of people talk about like George R.R. Martin, like trying to push away from the strict good versus evil limitations of Tolkien and other things.

I'm like, guys have been doing that since the 1960s. It's like the Elric series, to my understanding, and I haven't read it, but just from my understanding of it, is already pretty morally gray. So it's like there was definitely plenty of reactive, like, no, no, no, no, no. This isn't how morality works.

I'm going to write a story with more nuanced, like people were reacting to Tolkien in the 1950s and 60s. no no no no this isn't how morality works i'm going to write a story with more nuanced like like people reacting to tolkien in the 1950s and 60s and he i mean he says in this essay he's like these other people exist but they're not popular he like says people's names like this author does better work but no one knows who they are this author does better work but nobody knows who they are everyone's instead reading this piece of shit. Yeah. Everybody get out a piece of paper and write down the names of all these...

We'll get there, but he just starts listing people off later on the essay. He goes full opening of the Iliad and just is listing off names. This is like the opening... Which gospel is that? That has like the opening lineage where it's like, and he was the son of... Herod, son of Ham opening lineage where it's like and he was the

son of herod son of ham son of harrod and he was the son of like seth who was the son of adam and it's like wow that's a that's a perfect lineage all the way back that's like yeah i'm pretty sure that's like in genesis or like something well it's it's in it's it's in one of the it's in one of the gospels uh tracing jesus's lineage all the way back to Adam. And it's like, can you chill? It says here, a look at the books on sale to, I don't know that name, I'm guessing it's like a sci-fi bookstore. A look at the books on sale to Cienfuegos customers

shows the same old list of Lovecraft and Rand and Heinlein and Niven, beloved of so many people who would be horrified to be accused of subscribing to the Daily Telegraph or belonging to the Monday Club. And yet our reading with every sign of satisfaction, views by writers who would make the Telegraph editorials look like the work of Bakunin and Monday members sound like spokesmen for the Paris Commune. Yeah, so it's like these people would be like, if you accuse them of being in right-wing groups like Daily Telegraph or Monday Club, and they would be upset. Like, obviously, I would be upset. But they were extremely satisfied to be reading writing from authors who would make the Daily Telegraph and Monday Club look like radical.

Yeah. Make them look like radical leftists in comparison, especially somebody like Heinlein. Niven. Niven. Like he lists off the four really, really bad ones, I think, right off the bat there with Lovecraft, Rand, Heinlein, and Niven all being these extremely problematic people. Yeah, I mean, I think for us anyway, it's not controversial to say those authors suck. Yeah, it's really not at all. But I don't think there was quite the like. Oh, especially not in the 70s. Like, Rand was becoming popular.

That's part of the reason, like... Getting beat to death with my bare fucking hands. Yeah, like that was the era when she was her most popular and people were just like, wow, this is so good. And I'm like, it's written like a fucking fifth grader. It's just so disconnected from the state of how reality even functions at a basic level.

So it's like, how could anyone consume this as science fiction? It's just pure fantasy. I like the idea of Monday Club members as spokesmen for the Paris Commune. That's really funny. He's a bit of a comedian. Yeah, I mean, Moorcock's getting his digs in, like, as expertly as he can. Yeah, this essay is, I think, prime example of how things get funnier the more specific you get like when you're calling out a specific guy for saying a specific thing it's way funnier than

being like people should stop saying this when you say he's like hey john he didn't he didn't he didn't just say hey conservatives uh it would make conservatives seem like leftists ha ha ha he's like no i'd make monday club members seem like spokesmen for the Paris Commune. I mean, the next sentence at the beginning of this paragraph, he literally calls out a guy by name. It says, some years ago, I remember reading an article by John Pilgrim in Anarchy, which I assume was a magazine, in which he claimed Robert Heinlein as a revolutionary leftist writer. The next line is so funny. As a result of this article, I could not for years bring myself to buy another issue he was like he was like what the what the fuck are you talking about like heinlein is a revolution what the hell this man was like virulently anti-communist

then the next line is a pot shot at uh state communists uh because he goes um i'd been confused in the past by listening to hardline communists offering views that were somewhat at odds with the anti-authoritarian claims. But I never expected to hear similar things from anarchists. So he's like, you guys should fucking know better. Basically, you should know better. It's like, you guys don't worship state apparatuses. You guys don't like military nonsense. Why the heck are you like worshiping a guy

like he's like i get it if like fucking auth comms do it because they're all like the state blah blah but like come on guys like you're better than this he also then a little bit later makes a point which is still very common for you to need to make especially on like twitter spaces and online spaces about calling yourself apolitical, which is shorthand for conservative, because he says a little bit further down, my experience of science fiction fans at the conventions, which are held annually in a number of countries, mainly the US and England, had taught me that those who attend were reactionary and in parentheses claiming to be apolitical, but somehow always happy to vote Tory and believe Colin Jordan to have a point. So he said that he's used to going to cons and meeting people like I'm apolitical, like are always voting conservative.

Yeah. Which is, I think, has not changed. Oh, absolutely not. That's those are the sort of people who are like, the Democrats are just being too radical, and so I'm a centrist. I'm a centrist. What does that even mean? I'm apolitical.

I don't believe in parties. I just vote for Republicans every single time. Yeah, it's just whoopsies. No, I voted for Obama once. Once. Back in 2008, I voted for Obama. Back in 2008. Shut the fuck up.

I thought that Mitt Romney had some points. I'm going to read this one because, again, it is just him calling motherfuckers out. I always assumed that for one reason or another there were exceptions among sci-fi enthusiasts. Then the underground papers began to emerge and I found myself in sympathy with some of their attitudes. But once again, I saw the old arguments aired. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, and the rest, bourgeoisie reactionaries to a man, Christian apologists, crypto-Stalinists were being praised in IT,

Friends and Oz, and everywhere else, people whose general political ideas I thought I shared. Again, saying all these people who I thought I agreed with on politics are now publishing essays in favor of all these authors who are, again, reactionaries to a man, Christian apologists, crypto-Stalinists. Like he's just finding buzzword soup here,

like throwing everything at the wall but again talk about the names he's throwing at the wall here now some of these we obviously understand like tolkien and c.s lewis clearly christian apologists c.s lewis is fucking wild shit when we eventually cover the chronicles of narnia oh boy it's like honestly the last battle could be like a four four episode like mega series on trevor has already requested that he be on the one for the last battle well that would be appropriate um because it is literally just revelations yeah and it's fucking weird but so sure like takes what could have been a good story and just kind of takes a massive dump all over it tolkien and c.s lewis clay christian apologist he's talking about like frank herbert

um and isaac asimov you know as like crypto stalinist and reactionaries um i'm not sure who's supposed to be who in this but i was about to say i i feel like i think he's going to call like frank herbert a crypto stalinist or something anyway he's taking a lot of fucking pot shots here i'm gonna say i'll go to bat for you, boyfriend Herbert. Then Moorcock says that he began writing essays stating these things out and that people started accusing him of being reactionary. Yeah, that's really funny. Or being a spoil sport for basically telling people that their favorite authors were bad people with bad politics. And they're like, you're just being a spoiler.

You're not letting me enjoy my art. This is very much like you're still listening to R Kelly. Yeah. Um, despite knowing everything he did, but also R Kelly's would be like, imagine if R Kelly wrote songs that were like, I love having like underage sex slaves.

And everyone was like, yeah, but the song's good, though. Yeah. Yeah. If his music more legitimately espoused his own views. And they were just like, yeah, but I still like it. It's like he just, you know, he just has sex slaves that he gets to pee on him. So his next paragraph, he points out, I think it was the name of the peer article that he either started or was part of called New Worlds. And he starts off by saying that they were attacked by all the people you would expect them to be attacked by because they were told that they had an emphasis in revolution.

And so as expected, they were attacked by like Tory MPs, by the Daily Express express yada yada you know people you'd expect to be upset with their content wow a tory literally asked a question about them in the house of commons about why public money which was like essentially just a tiny arts council grant being spent on them even though the arts council grant i'm sure is like something that is spent like across the board like on many different things yeah and it's just like they just received a small portion of it yeah um it's in the editorial mp of course still had to be mad about it um so it says you know we were it's just an excuse so they can be like we need to defund this thing so like my taxes go down

by 0.02 percent because because that.02% is very important to my year end dividends fucking right so he says obviously they were attacked by the people he thought they were attacked by but then he says but we're the only sci-fi magazine to pursue what you might call a determinately radical approach

and he just says SF is a shorthand for sci-fi and sci-fi buffs were the first to attack us with genuine vehemence our main serial running at the height of our troubles was called bug jack baron written by norman spinrad who had taken an active part in radical politics in the u.s and used his story to display the abuse of democracy and media in america he later went on to write a satirical sword and sorcery epic, The Iron Dream, intended to display the fascist

elements inherent to the form. The author of the novel existed, as it were, in an alternate history to our own. His name was Adolf Hitler. The book was meant to point to the number of sci-fi authors who were, in a sense, unsuccessful Hitlers. Hi, Glenn. Hi, in a sense, unsuccessful Hitlers. Heinlein.

Heinlein. Heinlein. I think we should keep saying Heinlein. Yeah, because he's so easy to take a pot shot at. But what Moorcock's pointing out here is that that's all of them. Yeah, it's like a decent number of them. Or a huge portion of them. So they were attacked off the bat most strongly by sci-fi fans and this this honestly doesn't surprise me that

much because i mean i've had plenty of interactions if anyone has followed me on twitter for a while um is that one interaction with warhammer fans that oh my god dog piled dude the warhammer fans got real mad at you because i pointed out that all art is all media is inherently political because of know, the fact that anyone who creates it exists in a time and a place and a world. It's like, you know, and then they'd come at me with stuff like, oh, what about big titty bimbo anime? And I was like, that's pretty explicit. That's like a really, really obvious. I forgot that they tried to switch like, oh, what about this anime and it's like and it's like i don't even think that that do you think that that i blocked everybody and they were like why are you blocking everybody it's like

because you guys are just annoying well it's like you if i had unlimited time i could definitely go into all of the inherent yeah i dropped the thing where i was like hey listen guys the uh the politics of sexualization and politics of sexuality are absurdly complicated and have been written about for about 150 years so i think like not even to get into the way like like women are portrayed in anime like specifically but it's like the people who get most pissed about it are the people who are fans of the thing because they don't want to like critically analyze any of it because if they do they might like come to some unhappy conclusions about themselves that they don't

want to come to and which actually goes back to my like my admission at the beginning of this recording is the fact that this essay annoyed me because it was right but but at the same time it makes me talk about my favorite authors in a way that's not good but at the same time it's like i feel like anarchists are used to you know or we should i think more point here is that the reason he's so mad is because he expected us to do better yeah that we should be more critical and that we have to his his ideas lacked in being as critical as he expects us to be. And I see where his point comes from, because at its core, like especially anarchism is like an inherently deeply self-critical analysis. Like it is because it's like it needs to be. It has to be the whole idea of, you know, you know, essentially perpetual constant vigilance, et cetera.

Killing the cop inside your own head. It's it's It's a lot of self-criticism. It's a lot of self-reflection and it would make sense you'd think it would make more sense to people who would be self-described as being anarchist would be like, yeah, you know

this piece of media is political. Like it's all still political and you know, like there are views that are in here that are deeply problematic um and and i don't even know if there's an issue with necessarily enjoying reading any of it and i don't even know if that's his big problem here no i think his big problem is that then radicals are going on to defend these works as if they are radical and good yeah it's like calling them radical even when they're not yeah i think he's not saying that you can't anything

even says later there's escapism is fine like reading a book and enjoying it is totally fine the problem is then going out and being like tolkien actually radical, believe it or not. And you're like, he's not. It's like he was pretty explicitly not. Like he even himself was like, I just want to go for him. I fully admit that the, and we'll have to, we'll do an episode about it at some point, that like the radical messages that I personally have taken from Lord of the Rings are ones that i took myself yeah and

that you've like read into the text that i have read something that tolkien intended or something that most people read from the text yeah it's something that i personally intended which is probably more of a reflection of the way i feel about things and i assigned meaning to these stories as opposed to the stories having those meaning themselves yeah it's fine but but say any any deeply radical content in something that Tolkien wrote would have been entirely self-perceived. You know, it wouldn't,

it's not something that Tolkien intended. I think, well, the one thing he might've intended as radical is his anti, like, industry. Oh yeah, but yeah. Just a big shaking hands meme between Tolkien and Zerzan. Yeah. It's like a linguist and a guy who believes you should destroy language. Bye-bye.

Anyway, let's go on to the next paragraph here because we're talking about a bunch of little Hitler's. Oh, man. This is his first name drop of someone I actually recognize as being a good author because he talks about who came who came to new worlds like who was writing for new worlds also i think we don't have to feel bad about just reading large sections of text from this essay because it is uh on libcom yeah but i don't worry about being copyright struck but essentially people came to new worlds because they couldn't get their stories published in other sci-fi and other sci-fi papers in the u.s um so like and more cock is british

so like unfortunately they would like americans would submit stuff to new worlds because they were like able to publish it in the uk when the u.s was like being hyper you can't do this um well i mean it's like we're like cold war hype. We're talking like the 60s, 70s. Like clearly they're not going to let anyone publish anything. Yeah, and it's not even like the government mandated that you can't do it. It's more like the industry did not want to incur the potential wrath of the government. So they were like, nah, we'll just avoid this. They didn't want to get McCarthy. Yeah, they didn't want to get McCarthy.

avoid this. They didn't want to get McCarthy. Blacklist. Yeah, they didn't want to get McCarthy. And he mentions for the first time here Harlan Ellison, who I know as being really, really good from what I've read personally. But also like Thomas Dish, John Sladek, Harvey Jacobs. Again, these are people that not a lot of people know the names of. Like the most popular name in this list is Harlan Ellison, mostly just because I have no mouth and I'm a scream. Like that's like if people mention Harlan, that's the only one that a lot of people remember, even though most of his work and I have assumed most of the work of the people in this list are pretty radical, anti-authoritarian stuff. Yeah. So he says in this in this little paragraph that he lists all those people saying they came to him and they published a good deal of their best work and at the time most controversial work in New Worlds. And Heinlein fans attacked New Worlds for, quote, destroying science fiction.

Escapism this form might be, but it posed as a literature of ideas and that we contended it wasn't unless the green berets were a profoundly philosophical movie yeah he and and this is something i i'm finding interesting about more cock in this essay it's like he also kind of looks at something like heinlein and things like that as being a little bit and I hate this word but and he never says it but pretentious where like um posing as a literature of ideas when in reality it was just escapism it's like he's like this stuff isn't like deeply philosophical deeply meaningful this stuff is just pure escapism for fascists who wish that it was more like fascism and like he's not even necessarily positing that the work of people like harland

ellison and stuff are literatures of ideas like he's mostly like science fiction is like he's more self-aware i think yeah then then most authors that are like i want to do a big thing and he's like listen guys it's science fiction like you can present some cool ideas but try not to pretend like it's like um especially something like Heinlein it's like try not to pretend that this is like some deep-minded nonsense some like philosophical text of deep importance he's like and and I think you'd probably argue that there are very few examples of deep importance he's like and and i i think he'd probably argue that there are very few examples of deep philosophical texts of great importance in general but like i think he names one of them by name a little bit later yeah he does too

which will be unsurprising when we get to it but yeah it's like he's he's like guys just stop pretending that this isn't just escapism yeah Yeah. And while you can get good thought-provoking stuff from these other authors. So the next paragraph here is where he talks about the Vietnam War and sci-fi authors' reactions to it. And how unfortunately split their opinions on it were. Yeah. on it were hey yeah um he even explains that the the founding member of the science fiction writers of america judith merrill was an ex-trotskyist turned libertarian and keep in mind when he uses the word libertarian this is just before the big shift um i believe with it's right around the same it's right around the same time so i'm assuming that he's talking about anarchist libertarian.

Yeah, someone who would describe herself as such at the time. Yeah, before it got Rothbard-ed. Also, though, I do want to, I feel like, you know what, never mind. I'm not going to make that point because I want to draw that heat right now. Anyway. Was this something about Trotskyists? Because even Bookchin was a trotsky's yeah how an actual significant number of uh early 2000s neocons were former trots yeah a bunch of how a bunch of real

reactionaries were former trots and that seems to be a theme well i mean trot himself yeah but like like there's a bunch of people that were like in the bush white house like the that era neocons who started off as trots and one of my favorite former trots is uh christopher hitchens oh shit that's a big one that's a big name started off it started off as a trot uh and then became christopher hitchitchens. That's a little fucked. I don't know if I know any Trotskyists in real life. Well, no, because there's not very many radical

leftists. They're also very busy at home printing more magazines to actually be organizing. Sorry, my own pot shots. The USSR would have been better if Trotsky were in charge did you know trotsky was mexican at time of death because he lived in mexico because he lived in mexico so he's actually a poc he's not believe it so in this sorry we're doing our own pot shots now

yeah um he goes down here and starts talking about the sort of the the the split in the sci-fi community about the role of the vietnam, where they wanted to put something, proposed they wanted the organization to buy space in a magazine condemning the war in Vietnam. They wanted to buy space in sci-fi magazine, like in New Worlds, opposing the war in Vietnam. Yeah, and this is being proposed to the entire Science Fiction Writers of America organization.

So, like, this isn't just new worlds, which probably would have very quickly been like, yeah, sure. Go ahead and run that shit. Yeah. This is your, you're right.

This is for the sci-fi writers. This is, this is for the organization writ large. And it's not just America. Cause a lot of these are Brits. It's just sci-fi writers generally. But he proposed that a good number of members agreed, including English members like himself. Agreed with alacr including english members like himself agreed with alacrity i love that alacrity which includes like harlan ellison uh sorry harry

harry harrison and then other americans were keen on it as well including harlan ellison and he admits to be fair frank herbert and larry niven were also both pro like anti-vietnam war yeah it's really weird because he goes on to explain that, that I think he says in here, right, that Herbert and Niven were anti, were anti the war, but were pro-U.S. involvement in like a bizarre way. I have to get down to that.

But he points out that a bunch of other authors were outraged at the idea that the science fiction writers of America shouldn't interfere in politics, which I think to him is just like an absurd point on its face coming from the genre that science fiction is. Oh, yeah. Yeah, because it ended up being a situation where they ran two ads. One pro one that was one that was against the war and one that was pro-war and one that was in support of american involvement okay so this is an interesting bit here because we've name dropped a bunch of these authors before including ones i've said i

like okay this next this next slice is going to be real rough so this next slice is uh finally the sci-fi magazines contained two ads, one against the war and one in support of American involvement. Those in support included Paul Anderson, Robert Heinlein, Anne McCaffrey, Daniel F. Galow, Keith Launer, as well as many other popular sci-fi writers that were against, as were against the war.

And as many other popular sci-fi writers as were against the war. Oh, so there's as many people pro-war. There were as many other popular as were against the war so there's as many people pro as there were anti and some of the pro war ones include people like paul anderson and ann mcafree yeah which is like what the hell man the interesting thing was that at the time many of the pro u.s involvement writers were and by and large still are, the most popular writers, sci-fi writers in the English-speaking world, let alone Japan, Soviet Union, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain,

where many of the good sci-fi readers think themselves as radicals. One or two other authors, British as well as American, are dear friends of mine who are personally kind and courageous people of inconsiderable integrity, but their political statements, if not always by any means,

their actions are stomach turning. So he's literally saying, even some of my friends are terrible. He's pointing out that these people, again, he's, he's reinforcing the idea that these people who would otherwise, you know,

consider themselves radical and are by and large, the most popular authors for the genre and McCaffrey, Paul Anderson, like these people who are who are wildly popular are inherently reactionary in their stances and actions even if they don't think themselves to be that way oh this next section i actually really really like because this is him just straight up like um um most people have to be judged by their actions rather than their remarks which are often surprisingly at odds writers when they are writing can only be judged by the substance of their work um the majority of the sf writers most popular with radicals are by and large crypto fascist to a man and woman there is lovecraft the misogynistic racist um there's heinlein the

authoritarian militarist there's ayn rand and this is great i just love shitting on ayn rand uh the rabid opponent of trained unionism and the left who like many a reactionary before her sees the problems of the world as a failure by capitalists to assume the responsibilities of good leadership um there's tolkien in that group of middle-class christian uh fanaticists oh no fan fantasists yeah he's just inventing words here who constantly sing the praises of bourgeois virtues and whose villains are thinly disguised working class agitators fear of the mob permeates their rural romances um look this is gonna be this is where my inner fan comes out i don't know at what, which villain of Lord of the Rings

is supposed to be a thinly veiled working class person. Is Sauron supposed to be working class? I don't. I think, I think it's because of, I think we're also dealing with a time of leftism that was still very industrial.

I fucking hate that. So, so like the anarchist, anarchist that way so i mean anarchist like anarcho-communist that's like that's like a broad um all the all the ancoms like died after the spanish civil war they're not they're not still let's say like the ansons like lasted a while um but like i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm calm friends i'm just dunking on you i'm sorry but like uh specifically thinking of it as hyper-industrialism is one way to look at it but also you know the the mob of the proletariat um in that in that it vastly outnumbers everybody

else um yeah i mean because there's like millions more, like there's a shit ton more orcs than there are Numenoreans. But again, if I was going to, if I'm going to critique Tolkien for being reactionary, I wouldn't say that like the bad guys are thinly veiled proletarians. It would more be like,

it's a jerk off about like the good philosopher king being necessary for a kingdom to survive. It'd be more like a- Like it's a jerk off about like the good philosopher king. Yeah. Being necessary for a kingdom to survive. It'd be more like a. Which kind of goes back to that. Seeing the problems of the world as a failure by capitalists to assume the responsibilities of good leadership. Yeah. Like I think Tolkien would argue that his ideas that the world would be better if you had a good godly philosopher king. Yeah.

So like again that's me just being pedantic because i feel called out but anyway let's continue um to all these and more the working classes of mindless beast which must be controlled or will savage the world um the answer is always leadership decency paternalism heinlein in particular uh is strong on this, Christian values, etc. And then, again, this is going to be reading hour because it's the only way for us to discuss it. It says, what can this stuff have in common with the radicals of any persuasion? The simple answer is perhaps romance. The dividing line between rightist romance, Nazi insignia, myths, etc., and leftist romance, insurgent cavalry, etc., is not always easy to determine.

A stirring image is a stirring image and can be employed to raise all sorts of atavistic or infantile emotions in us. Escapist or genre fiction appeals to these emotions. It does us no harm to escape from time to time but it can be dangerous to confuse simplified fiction with reality and that of course is what propaganda does that's a yeah that's a great point there where where this is what we were kind of mentioning earlier where he's like he's like you escapism is fine like it's not a problem to like get into this stuff and use it as but you have to remember that it's escape because it's not real. Like, the things that are being presented in this are not true and are not confusing,

hyper-simplified moral tales in fiction with the incredibly complex world that is reality is exactly the same thing that propaganda tries to do to narrow reality down to a very simplistic set of rights and wrongs to a very simplistic set of like um ideas where it's like you know you know why your life sucks because uh trans women i guess like you know like very simplistic answers to very complicated questions yeah he's very much like, yeah, it's escapism, but it's designed to raise strong emotions in you. And sometimes it can be hard to tell whether that's a right-wing version

of raising those emotions or a left-wing one. Like, you have to be careful which one you're letting yourself indulge in. In this next section, he is essentially calling out the way sci-fi deals with heroes and how it's actually reactionary. The way heroes are often presented in science fiction. I think from a more political perspective,

this, this section is also essentially a takedown of what happens to revolutionary leaders oh yeah because the point they're like if you're the leader of the revolution what often happens if you win and you're put and what you do with your position as leader so you can also i think on the one hand this is direct criticism of just the way sci-fi as a genre handles their protagonists but i think on the next level moorcock is also doing an analysis of wow revolutions handle yeah i mean it's kind of like uh it's i would see this as like a direct dig at something like aragorn where the bandit

hero like he kind of is like he's a the dunedain ranger like um at least i mean aragon always never makes any pretensions that he's not supposed to be oh yeah no he doesn't but that's um like he's still very much an underdog versus sauron and he says right here the bandit hero the underdog rebel so frequently becomes the political tyrant, and we are perpetually astonished. Such figures appeal to our infantile selves. What is harmful about them in real life is that they are usually immature, without self-discipline, frequently surviving on their charm.

Fiction lets them stay, like Zorro or Robin Hood, perpetually charming. In reality, they become petulant, childish, relying on a mixture of threats and self-pitying pleading like any baby. Yeah, so he's essentially like usual people who are like these romantic, charming, revolutionary heroes. Are usually actually giant babies that once they actually achieve some kind of political power, just like start throwing tantrums constantly. These are too often the revolutionary figures on whom we pin our hopes, to whom we sometimes commit our lives and whom we sometimes try to be because we fail to distinguish fact

from fiction. If I'm going to get, you know, a lot of more general like socialists and leftists mad at me, I can point out that one of the main culprits of this who still has not really been called out appropriately is someone like castro oh yeah who specifically his whole thing is charm that's his entire thing every you go on twitter right now and post a picture of like shirtless castro and you'll have a billion people wanking off about how much they want to fuck him. You know what I'm talking about?

You have so many leftists who are like, who like go on and on about how hot Castro was and how charming Castro was. Or like those pictures of young Stalin that aren't even actually pictures of young Stalin. The not pictures of young Stalin. Or like, you know, the time the CIA sent an assassin and Castro seduced her instead. They talk about these stories all the time. What is that doing? It's mythologizing Castro to let him keep his charm so you don't have to get into the realities of him being

essentially an autocratic ruler of Cuba where he was criminalizing gay people. He was criminalizing local religions. Criminalizing local religions. Indigenous religions. Throwing anarchists in prison. Throwing brown people in prison. Yeah, throwing people who weren't as light-skinned as him in prison a lot.

Like, there are a lot of reactionary bad things that the Castro regime did, especially in the first, like, 15 to 20 years of its existence. Like, they did a lot of bad stuff. But I think... But it's like, look at this charming guy. He could never have done something that horrible. The internet specifically, I think, does what Moorcock is talking about right here like diegetically the internet like continues to try and maintain the fiction of charm of Castro because that's the only way

to stop ourselves from actually having to analyze the the fact of what he was doing that's why I think you also get continued fascination with people like Che, because he died. Yeah, well, that's exactly what he mentions in this next section here, actually, is that it's, in reality, is too often the small, fanatical men with the faces and stance of neurotic clerks

who come to power while the charismatic heroes, if they are lucky, die gloriously, leaving us to discover that while we have been following them, imitating them, a new czar has manipulated himself into the position of power, and terror has returned with vengeance while we've been using all our energies living a romantic lie.

And, like, this is very much a you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. What's funny is you die a hero, and while that guy is dying a hero... Dying a real skis bucket just became Stalin becomes. Yeah. While you're over here following Lenin because he's really charismatic and like a yada yada. Suddenly, you know, fucking Stalin comes in next and just starts slaughtering everybody.

The whole point is that like like sure, there'll be a charismatic leader either gets appointed and becomes a petulant child or he dies gloriously. And the person who takes over is an erotic pencil pusher yeah and i'm i'm going to i know we're reading a lot of these lines because his prose is good like he's making good points that's why i want to read his actual words the next line well baby read that next line for me catho it's going to be right here. Heroes betray us. By having them in real life, we betray ourselves. Jesus. Heroes betray us.

And by following them and having them in real life, we betray ourselves. That's real heavy. I mean, like, I don't sometimes, but this is like, we're a fellow.

This is pretty anti-great man theory. This is pretty anti, this is pretty anarchist. This is very much kill your heroes. If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him, kill him. Like his point is we're anarchists. We should be doing better than this. Yeah. It's like, we should be understanding the fact that heroes don't exist.

Uh, they don't exist. Paul Atreides is not a good person. Yeah, I mean, the reason I get weird about him saying Frank Herbert earlier is because that's kind of also the point. But I do think he's right, though, in saying that not a lot of people interpret it that way. That's true. So, I mean, people can, I think, should be held partially, not necessarily entirely responsible. Because sometimes you write something and then it gets taken swung the worst way humanly possible.

But, you know, there's some degree of responsibility there as an author. In there, I think that also gets into what we talked about before a lot with things like Warhammer. Yeah. Satire. Can you do fascist satire yeah like they keep trying to say that we actually don't think the humans are good and then we'll publish four novels basically explaining why the humans are doing what they're doing and why they're justified to do it even if it's bad so like it well you're missing they're like well they're the least bad and like it's a world full of bad people and you just kind of have to pick

the ones who are the least bad but like are they really the least bad are they the least bad and like it's a world full of bad people and you just kind of have to pick the ones who are the least bad but like are they really the least bad are they the least bad and also like you can't have your cake and eat it too you can't do this like bro i just want to go be i want to go be one of the warhammer goblins and just do you know orc technology is my favorite technology ever yeah because you just put it together and it works for them. No, it only works because they believe it works. Yeah. It's entirely like, what's that? It's like, there's a word for that.

It's like apotheosis or whatever. Yeah, there's a word for like, it's like the idea that like a God exists because the people- To my knowledge, I think apotheosis is correct. That or like an egregore or something like that. Apotheosis might be the process of someone's life. Process of that um where it's like apotheosis might be the process of someone's process of that but it's like because we all collectively believe this this god exists

the god then does exist that's how orc technology works i do respect that hey i stole that that's part of my campaign setting but anyway kill your uh kill your fucking heroes um the heroes of heinland and rand are forever competent forever right they are oracles and protectors magic parents so long as we obey their rules um they are prepared to accept the responsibilities we would rather not bear they are they are fiction of ideas that they are leaders in Leaders in big quotes. Traditional sci-fi hero fiction on a huge scale, but it is only when it poses as a fiction of ideas that it becomes completely pernicious.

Again, when you take these sci-fi tropes and apply them to real life, it's bad. Yeah, I keep going, man, we shouldn't just keep reading every line, but they're all great. Every fucking line is great. At its most spectacular, it gives us Charlie Manson and Scientology

invented by this SF writer, L. Ron Hubbard, and an authoritarian system to rival the popes. It's like... To claim it as radical is quite another. It is rather unimaginative. It is usually badly written. Its characters are ciphers. Its propaganda is simple-minded and conservative. It is rather unimaginative. It is usually badly written. It is old. Its characters are ciphers.

Its propaganda is simple-minded and conservative. Good old-fashioned opium, which might be specifically designed for dealing with a potential revolutionary. It's like, ha-ha. This is literally whittling you down and making you less radical. Literally, like, again, that also reminds me of like the

le guin quote about rowling just the way he's like this is unimaginative badly written simplistic conservative and stupid yeah yeah yeah the the fucking line about this and politically rather mean-spirited i like i like how she like slides the the yeah Yeah, because Rowling is more like ethically mean-spirited because Rowling is more like a perniciously annoying liberal. I wouldn't even call her a liberal anymore. Well, I mean, she's liberal in the sense of what the Labor Party is and what the Democrats are now. It's like Nixon-era Republicans.

Yeah. Oh, man. Moorcock would hate Rowling so much. Oh, so much. Is he so much? You know what? I can look that up real quick just to make sure we're not talking about...

Is he past tense or present tense? I don't know. What are we going to do? Because if he's alive, I'm sure he hates Rowling with like a fiery passion. He is. He's an is. He's still alive.

Oh, he's old. He's 82. What a champ. I'm sure that he's probably just like, shut the fuck up. I don't want to deal with this anymore. I'm just going to go hide in whatever house I've got. I actually saw something recently. They're actually going to be putting out another Elric novel or something hey listen you gotta even when you're like in your 80s you gotta capitalize you know you gotta let's go down a little bit here um yeah lovecraft is a terror of sex um

basically we're not we won't read from from this one it's just a paragraph about why lovecraft sucks i think we've covered that quite a lot. He talks about how Lovecraft is scared of sex. He's scared of ugliness. He's an anti-Semite. And that a lot of his work can just be compared directly to fascism.

That's Farnham's freehold to Hitler's Lebensraum. This last, this line I am going to read though because I think it's funny. He wound up marrying a Jewess, which might or might not have been a sign of hope. We haven't heard you on the matter. Yeah, so like it might have been a sign of progress

that he married a Jewish lady, but we can't ask her about it. So, well, we're just going to have to assume he was a piece of shit forever. Then he admits here that he's not taking like a very consistent critical line that he's basically just bitching um because he assumes that we all know who he's talking about fiction about kings and queens is not necessarily royalist fiction any more than fiction about anarchists is likely to be libertarian fiction so yeah just because your book is about a king doesn't mean

it needs to be pro-monarchy but on on that same thing, just because your book is about anarchy doesn't mean it's actually anarchist. Yeah. I was about to say, we get to see that plenty of times in modern media where like anarchists are depicted and depicted poorly. As a writer, I have produced a good many fantastic romances in which kings and queens, lords and ladies figure largely, yet I'm an avowed anti-monarchist catch 22 never seemed to me to be in favor of militarism and just because many of heinlein's characters are soldiers or ex-soldiers i don't automatically assume he must therefore be in favor of war it depends what you use what use you make of such characters in a story and what in the final analysis you are saying

where it's like you can have a story with soldiers ex-soldiers kings queens lords ladies and you aren't necessarily writing a story about why those are good why those are good but when someone like highland comes out here and writes a story about why soldiers are good and war is good and the story is about that and it has soldiers and ex-soldiers in it and they're presented in a way as being like you know know, correct, correct, then it becomes a serious problem. Yeah. He goes and talks a little bit about the beginnings of sci-fi.

He does a little comparing of like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Oh, he likes H.G. Wells a lot. He does like H.G. Wells a lot. He does say that Jules Verne has some pretty good sentiments. He calls Captain Nemo a semi-anarchist. He does. The bitter rebels who've retreated from society. Yeah, like Codger, Captain Nemo, that sort of thing.

But at the end, he's like, they're essentially romantic outlaws, and the views they express are not sophisticated even by the standards of the 1890s. Well, because if you're in the 1890s, you could also read things like News From Nowhere. Yeah, I was about to say, you could be reading a book by William Morris that we reviewed a little while ago that are actually way more radical than that.

He does really like H.G. Wells, though. Oh, yeah. I mean, H.G. Wells was a socialist, was a self-declared socialist. But he wrote what was unusual about wells however is he was one of the first radicals of his time to take the trappings of the scientific romance and combine them with powerful and telling images to make uh bunion-esque allegories like the time

machine and the invisible man wells didn't have his characters talking socialism he showed the results of capitalism authoritarianism superst, and other evils because he was a far better writer than most of those who have ever written science fiction before or since he made his points with considerable clarity. He's a much better writer than those who have ever written before or since. And he even does take a little bit of a dig at Morris. Morris had been long-winded and backward-looking. Which we even did talk about, the fact that Morris was a bit more like back in the day.

Because Morris had a bit of medievalism in him. Yeah, he did. And that makes a little sense because he was even enamored by it enough to write fantasy the way he did. Where it was about writing old romantic stories. He just didn't want to write fantasy the way he did where like it was about writing old romantic stories you just didn't want to write it we talked about in the episode that his sort of romantic medievalist ruralism actually isn't that divorced from tolkien's in terms of like we need to go back to the land and live in like nice little houses yeah and this is this is probably why he considered himself a libertarian socialist and not an anarchist like he wouldn't have called himself

an anarchist like somebody like uh kropotkin would have because kropotkin was an industrialist to an extent like he was pro-industry um unfortunately um yeah but he makes a great a point here where he's like wells is brilliant because he didn't make his character sit around and talk about socialism he just made his stories polemics on why capitalism authoritarianism and superstition are bad the news from nowhere is really just a guy sitting there and being like and that's even i think here is the reason that he later calls the dispossessed a little journalistic um yeah is because it is just kind of but the thing is it is it gets it gets more into that it's more complicated but he's pointing out that what hg

wells does and um Wells took the tech, he talks about Rudyard Kipling a lot in this essay. We haven't talked about him yet, but he talks about Kipling a lot because Kipling was sort of the progenitor of a style of storytelling that then was sort of picked up by a lot of British authors,

just the way Rudyard Kipling wrote. Yeah, because I know very little about Kipling. Kipling just sounds like the last name of an astronomer to me. I mean, you should be aware of Rudyard Kipling. He wrote The Jungle Book. He wrote all those sorts of stories. He wrote a bunch of other things. He was also pro-colonialism for the British Empire.

He was born and raised in british india his pro-militarism got his son killed in world in in a war by like convincing his son that he should join the british military and then his son died i'm pretty sure in like world war one so but rudyard kipling despite having like some good works and popular works like everyone knows jungle book within the jungle book i growing up was a huge fan of the animated version of rikki-tikki-tavi of like the the mongoose that kills the cobras oh yeah love the animated one because it's also narrated wonderfully by you know someone you guys would recognize you should look it up and you can watch it for free on youtube um but reddard kipling also was the guy who invented the phrase white man's burden uh that's fucked that's actually

really fucked because he believes like the white man's burden to go to India and like teach Indians how to be civilized. So Christ as though like before the Industrial Revolution, they weren't out producing and out like competing Britain and the entirety of England in like every metric. Yes, but he's very like Rudyard Kipling is that guy. But he also wrote a fuck ton of like fiction. He wrote all these like animal stories. He wrote all the just a pile of stories and he became he was wildly popular in England and the his like style of storytelling the way he constructs his stories and that sort of thing is what. Moorcock is talking about the fact that a lot of people imitate Kipling's style, is that the way in which he formatted his writing and his stories sort of caught on as to whether you liked him or not. He imitated his writing because that's what the style was. That's what it was.

So when he's talking about H.G. Wells here, he says he took the techniques of Kipling and preached his own brand of socialism until Wells, who he calls the most talented, original, intelligent writer of his kind. Almost all of science fiction had devoted itself to attacks on decadence and military unpreparedness, urging our leaders to take a stronger moral line and our armies to reequip and get better officers. That's all Kipling. that's all Kipling and by large this was much of the tone of the sci-fi which followed Wells from Kipling's but effective reactionary

with the Nightmare and as easy as ABC paternalistic blah blah blah paternalistic aerial controllers whose rays pacify the mob that's fucked as hell amazing Oppenheim Arlen Buchan

Lequex who the heck is that that name is amazing probably terrible hundreds Oppenheim, Arlen, Bukin, Lequex, Lequex? Who the heck is that? That name is amazing, probably terrible. Hundreds of others who predominantly were following Kipling in warning of the dangers of socialism, mixed marriages, free love, anarchist plots, guidance conspiracies, the yellow peril, and so on and so on.

Even Jack London wasn't what one might call an all-around libertarian libertarian any more than wells was when he toyed with his ideas of an elite core of samurai who are actually not a great deal different from how soviet communist party members saw themselves or were described in official fiction and propaganda well wells was a to my knowledge, state socialist. Yes. So it's, you know, that's not too surprising. This is Moorcock being like, look, Wells was the best. But he still kind of sucked. He still kind of sucked.

At moments. He's like, he's the best science fiction author who ever lived. Also, he still had some bad ideas that really made me uncomfortable. Right here he's saying that like Jack London, who is presented as being like a sort of a libertarian. Yeah, like a rugged, like outdoorsy, like I'll live on is presented as being like a sort of a libertarian. Yeah, like a rugged outdoorsy. Rugged outdoorsy individualist. I'll live on my own. Yeah, that's the other thing.

He's still proposing things like a group of samurai that behave in basically the way Soviet bureaucrats portray themselves. Yeah. It's actually not that different. Oh, God. By and large, the world we got in the 30s was a world of sci-fi writers of the the world the sci-fi writers of the day hoped we would have the world that we got in the 30s was the world

sci-fi writers of the day hoped we would have strong leaders reshaping nations the reality of these hero leaders was not of course entirely would have been visualized Nuremberg rallies and strength through joy perhaps but crystal knocked and gas ovens seem to go a bit too far. So he's pointing out that the world of the 1930s

was the world that sci-fi up to that point was saying we should have. We should have a time when strong leaders should reshape all of our nations, yada, yada, yada. But then what actually happened wasn't just like a reshaping of nations. It was mass death and, you know. Genocide. Genocide. Like it was like this is not like they all viewed this like paternalistic,

like we will usher the world into a new positive age. And it just turned into absolutely like slaughtering millions of innocents. Yeah. He's saying like, oh, that's what the world they wanted. It just went a bit too far. Yeah. I mean, it's obviously really sarcastic, but like that's what the world they wanted it just went a bit too far yeah i mean it's obviously really sarcastic but like that's um so the next section i don't think we need to go over in detail it's too much detail it's about the a couple american like pulp magazines run by a guy

by john campbell um astounding science fiction stories um amazing stories and throwing wonders even i've heard of these like Like I've, I've heard, what's funny is these are all the, these are all the magazines I've heard of. Yeah. Like astounding science fiction stories I've heard of before. I've heard of new worlds. I've heard of amazing stories and thrilling wonder.

Yeah. These are the essays people are publishing things in. And he talked about here, even like sci-fi authors and like people running these magazines, like John Campbell in the time after, even like sci-fi authors and like people running these magazines like john campbell in the time after like before and like after world war ii were like wild-eyed paternalistics fierce anti-socialists whose work to affect deep-seated conservatism and saw a bolshevik menace in every union meeting that's that a great line. They believed, in common with authoritarians everywhere,

that radicals wanted to take over old-fashioned political power, turn the world into a uniform mass of workers with themselves as the commissars. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, are they wrong? They were about as left-wing as the National Enquirer or the Saturday Evening Post, where their stories would sometimes appear. They were xenophobic, smug, and confident that the capitalist system would flourish throughout the universe, though they were, of course, against dictators and the worst sort of exploiters. No longer Jews, but often still aliens.

Rugged individualism was the most sophisticated political concept they could manage in the pulp tradition the code of the west became the code of the space frontier and a spaceship captain had to do what a spaceship captain had to do all of you suck ass yeah hey listen i enjoy watching this might be a this might be a bad uh admitt. I enjoy Firefly, but that's just Firefly in a nutshell. Yeah. Cap's got to do it. Cap's got to do it, baby. Yeah, the movie is exceptionally lib, too.

So it's like... I mean, it was written by Joss Whedon. Yeah, I know. Because he's exceptionally like... Joss Whedon is like... He's... Joss Whedon... He's just kind of an idiot.

Joss Whedon is nerd aaron sorkin never really thought of it that way but that works he's aaron sorkin for like sci-fi and like fantasy people because to me he's always struck me as somebody who's like really politically illiterate like in the most extreme way where he he thinks oh this is a cool concept for my for my thing and it like, it's kind of like this and doesn't even think about the implications. Like he made Firefly and was like, ooh, there's like a Civil War thing going on,

but didn't think about the implications of making the main characters have fought for the side of what was essentially the Confederacy. Like he didn't think about it. But I don't think he was like sitting there intentionally writing a polemic about how good the South is or anything. He was just like, a big government and a weird pastoral group and they fought the

law and the law won and they were like and he was like that's just kind of cool right and like didn't even think about the implications of what he was talking about at all but i think morecock would argue morecock would argue that that's the whole point yeah i know because he in at his core is conservative he can write that story and not even think about the implications of it. Well, yeah, because he's he he's like the I'm I don't even know if he thinks of himself as a political. I just think he thinks of his work as a political because he doesn't even think about it for 10 seconds. He's just kind of puts it down on the page. I think he's like he's like a weird. So he's a comic book nerds. Aaron Sorkin. Yes.

Eric and Sorkin is at least aware that he's making political statements yeah he's just making really stupid political statements but like the kind of people the if anyone who grew up anyone has ever watched jojo that's how i feel about jojo's bizarre adventure too but it's it's the same thing as joss whedon where i'm like this guy is not thinking about the potential political implications of any of the things he's written down. This is incredibly fast. The people whose parents grew up idolizing West Wing are their kids grew up idolizing Joss Whedon.

It's so funny. It's the same kind of people and I'm going to stick to that. Listen, I'll give everybody their camp. You guys can watch Buffy and be excited about how campy it is. I mean, Buffy, I think, is generally slightly less political than some of the other stuff Whedon has done.

It's also some of his less aggravating. I don't know. I couldn't finish Buffy. It was too camp for me. It's too camp for me. It's incredibly camp, but, you know. I'm gay. I'm not that gay.

This next paragraph is basically him talking about how people like Campbell who ran the magazine and other authors like him they handled themselves like they were writing westerns they weren't writing westerns and what they were doing they said themselves they believed that they were doing like creating ideas they thought they were putting forward sci-fi with the intent of putting new ideas out there. But what happened was a bunch of their ideas ended up being adopted by governments and the military because all their ideas they were putting out were inherently conservative reactionary ideas. Yeah. They weren't presenting new ideas. These were old ideas that conservatives had had for like 3,000 years and they were like parroting them back as though they were something new um and then

trying to present it as though these are like new interesting ideas about how the world is and how the world should be and yada yada and um i i like his first line here about how the world the war helped it provided character types and a good deal of authoritative-sounding technological terms which could be applied to scientific hardware and social problems alike and sounded reassuringly expert in quotation marks. This is him talking about the Vietnam War. Yeah. So he's also mentioning that Vietnam War, World War II,

all of these wars presented people with a bunch of technological terms that they could use to make themselves sound smarter. When they were writing sci-fi when they were writing science but he's that's where he says it wrote both ways because the military then adopted um names for things that they took straight from science fiction yeah um let's go down here because he talks about elrond hubbard he talks about he talks about dianetics and elrond hubbard elrond hubbard is a piece of shit just so just so everybody knows i, I posted on Twitter a while ago. We did get a Scientologist sneakily putting a bunch of pamphlets out at the food pantry I work at. Jesus Christ.

Yeah, just putting it on a table without telling us and then walking away hoping that some of the pretty vulnerable people who come in there to get stuff would have taken one and become Scientologists. I did throw them away, but I did keep one and post it on our post-it board because I thought it was fucking hilarious. Amazing. It was like, do you like, it's like the key to your car is the key. This drives your car. This drives your soul. And it was like diegetics or whatever. Amazing.

I was like, this is insane. So the end of this paragraph where he's talking about John Campbell, the guy who ran like Amazing Stories and these other magazines, increasingly became more ravingly conservative across time, like quasi-messianic and a bunch of other things.

He talks about being on a panel with this guy and some of this guy's views. And you guys, this is some heinous shit. See, I would love to see weird mixed panels at cons like this because i would just be like holy shit what is happening so he said that this guy john uh campbell was the first one to write regularly publish l ron hubbard it was his magazine that first uh published dianetics of the mind all kind he also when faced with the watts riots of the mid-60s seriously proposed and went on to went on to proposing that there were quote-unquote natural slaves who were unhappy if freed this is

the guy who was in charge of multiple sci-fi rags in america yeah he was the the head editor able to like say yes and no to pretty much anything going on there. I sat on a panel with him in 1965 as he pointed out that the worker bee, when unable to work, dies of misery, that the Mojics, when freed, went to their masters and begged to be enslaved again, that the ideals of the anti-slavers who fought in the Civil War were merely expressions of self-interest, and that the blacks were against emancipation, which was fundamentally why they were indulging in leaderless riots in the suburbs of los angeles i was speechless actually i said four words in all science fiction psychology jesus christ before i collapsed leaving john brunner to perform a cool demolition of campbell's arguments which left the editor calling on

god in support of his views an experience rather more intense for me than watching dr strange love at the cinema so the guy who's making the final editorial call on science fiction stories in america through the 60s was a guy who believed that some people were naturally slaves that like people were happier enslaved the people who were emancipators in the civil war were just doing it out of self-interest. Like this is the guy who is gatekeeping science fiction. A lot of science fiction. That whole self-interest thing just reads a reeks of objectivism to me. It makes me really fucking mad.

And the point is, I think more cash weighing out here is not that this guy specifically ruined sci-fi all by himself. The point is that he was surrounded by authors who agreed with him and that the readers of his magazines were reading these stories uncritically that he was presenting with his views. He was, he was prevent,

he was presenting stories that at least agreed with or didn't directly contradict his views. And because he was a, you know, a conservative and therefore had he got very little backlash from the state from the establishment the establishment in general got very little backlash despite his work and the work that he was allowing to be published being full of ideas that he was personally okay with and that wanted to disseminate

throughout the population and more colleagues again circling back to the entire point of this essay is more cocky saying this is what was happening in sci-fi in the 60s and most radical readers weren't thinking about it thinking about it or were not critical of the works they were reading because like these are at cons so you hear this guy he was saying this at a fucking con panel this isn't like he wrote it in a journal that other industry professionals read this is one of the things where i'm kind of he was saying it's in public at a fucking convention that like now would like i feel like con spaces have gotten so much better if that's the case jesus uh i mean i would i would argue that cons are probably better now than they used to be i would say that even though there's probably still lots of reactionaries oh yeah they at least have

to keep their mouth shut yeah the most of them have to keep their mouth shut now at these cons, more or less. And the people that don't keep their mouth shut are, like, more increasingly isolated. But then there's, of course, examples like, you know, cons where, like, Anita Sarkeesian would get, like, crap thrown at her. Yeah, but that's getting into, like, I almost want to call that a slightly different form of reactionary stuff. Because that's getting more into gamers. Who do overlap with sci-fi fans. But that's not who Moorcock is talking about. It's just imagining someone doing this now.

Going up there and being like, some people are naturally born slaves. And you would get a shit ton of people who would be like, he's just speaking to power he's just speaking truth to power those people would only be saying it on twitter on twitter they wouldn't be they wouldn't say it at the con because they would get because they know that they would get mobbed they get their ass beat by a furry yeah somebody in a giant freaking fox fursuit would pick them up and throw them against the wall which good um unironically the furries have done a way better job at denazifying their own communities than most other communities have. Hey, listen, one of the most important developers

of the COVID vaccine, who's on Twitter, she presents herself entirely through her fursona on Twitter. We are entirely furry allies on this podcast. Oh, man. Get over podcast. Oh, man. Get over it. Oh, and keep in mind, Campbell approved Heinlein's Starship Troopers

to be serialized in Astounding Tales, just so everybody knows where Starship Troopers originated. It came from the guy who thought they were natural slaves. Which, what a surprise that he would publish Heinlein. Now, he actually described Starship Troopers a little bit. We don't need to do that. He talks about how Atlas shrugged, how popular it was and how much it sucks. Yeah.

He mentioned that Heinlein started writing Farnham's Freehold and Stranger in a Strange Land. And there's a line here where it's like i kept finding the supporters of the angry brigade were enthusiastic about heinlein that people with whom i thought i shared libertarian principles were getting off on every paternalistic bourgeois writer who had ever given me the creeps so he's like authors who i hated people who i thought were my friends were just rabidly defending these guys i hated it's like I still can't fully understand it. Certainly, I can't doubt the sincerity of their idealism, but how does it equate with the celebration of writers

like Tolkien and Heinlein? The vagueness of the prose, which allows for liberal interpretation. Ciphers they use instead of characters are capable of suggesting a wholly different meaning to certain readers. Which is what I specifically have done. With Tolkien. To me, their naive and emblematic reading of society is fundamentally misanthropic

and therefore anti-libertarian. We are faced once again with quasi-religion presented to us as radicalism. At best, it's the philosophy of the Western applied to the complex social problems of the 20th century. It's Reaganism. It's John Wayne and Big John McLean and the Green Berets. It's George Wallace and Joe McCarthy. 20th century it's reaganism it's john wayne and big john mclean and the green berets it's george wallace and joe mccarthy as it is most refined um at its most refined it's william f buckley jr who already a long way more sophisticated than heinland is still pretty simple-minded

and this and and he even is calling out like the big issue with individualism, like rugged individualism, that sort of like modern conservative libertarian principle being going hand in hand with paternalism. It's like a strong faith in paternalism, albeit a tolerant and somewhat distant paternalism. And many otherwise sharp-witted libertarians seem to see nothing in the morality of a John Wayne Western to conflict with their views, despite the fact that it's a Western. Westerns are almost inherently, as a genre, almost inherently reactionary to begin with, unless you specifically make an anti-Western Western, which some people did, where you inherently are making a Western. Those anti-Western Westerns, though, were kind of like the end of the western like they were like the death knell of the western because people realized that they weren't interested in the western

anymore and were more interested in the deconstruction and destruction of the genre there's i've seen uh like video essays talking about how like you can sort of track that blazing saddles was the final nail in the coffin for the western really good yeah um but like I've seen essays pointing out that like you can actually kind of track this across the popularity of different genres of media where like you'll basically get it new and earnest and then it sort of reaches like a zenith of where it is the most it it can possibly be and then we suddenly get the boys yeah and then you and that yeah and then you get a downturn where people are are critiquing and deconstructing that genre itself and i think the one i talked about was talking about comparing westerns to superhero movies and saying that we are now up we've

approached the era of like essentially sad saturation of the genre and we've seen it at its most it like we saw avengers infinity war yeah like we saw say infinity war and end game was like the the end because it they built so far and it's like now they have to rebuild that's like the apotheosis of the genre it just is like that little era of the mcu it is like whether you like it or not. That's, that's, that's, that's the genre. Yeah. The modern superhero epic is now, despite Disney continuing to try and make more of them. If you say I saw Thor love and thunder and it wasn't that good. It was pretty, pretty bad,

actually. That's what you see. Even though they're making more of them, there's a general downward climb in people's opinions of them across time. Like the general public opinion, go on the internet. You're going to get a bunch of fanatics. You know what I mean.

And what you're seeing is a rise in popularity of deconstructions of the superhero genre, which is typified by the boys. I think you also got a little taste of it early on with things like, was that that new reboot of The Watchmen? Oh yeah, they had The Watchmen. That came out too early for people to be ready.

I'm not talking about Zack Snyder's. I know. You're the one I'm talking about. No, I mean that it wasn't super popular, and I think it's because it came out too early in the arc of popular. Because it came out before Endgame. Yeah, because that was the one where there was like the Watchmen, but in the future, where like they deal with the K KKK and they talk about the Tulsa race riots and a bunch of stuff yeah and and they do stuff like uh make a lot of people were pissed off because they made Rorschach exactly what he would be which is which is a fucking villain which is it which is they made they made people who found his journal conspiracy

theorists who on the level of QAnon which they would be which is exactly what they were shock is like but a bunch of like dumb chuds who were like i love rorschach and then alan moore's over here like you're fucking insane he is awful now more so quote was if he's like i won't come within 10 feet of anyone that thinks rorschach was a hero yeah it's like he's like he's he's in he's and this is alan moore of course he's gonna immediately like say it to someone's face like he's had people at cons come up to me like i love rorschach so much and he's like get immediately say it to someone's face. He's had people at cons come up to him and be like, I love Rorschach so much. And he's like, get the fuck away from me.

Just straight up, get out of here. Get away from me. He's not supposed to be a good person, and you reading good things into him makes you a bad person. Makes you a bad person. Like he is a horrible human being. I think we have reached that stage, though, with superhero movies now,

where your eyes and popularity of anti-superhero movies i think we also had that a little bit with what i want to call like i'd say the only thing keeping me watching any marvel movies is the extreme bisexual energy running through them i feel like love and thunder was like a gamble straight towards bisexual energy i mean it was because yeah valkyrie and chris hemsworth valkyrie and hemsworth you like natalie portman even though occasionally she was gaunt for the thing but look let me start in my childhood crush natalie portman natalie portman don't look my two i wasn't big on like having crushes on movie stars growing up because like I didn't see the point

but the ones that every time I saw them I was like I find that person very attractive my two were Natalie Portman and Elliot Page so I don't know what that says about me clearly I was bisexual long before I knew I was yeah but to say the universe revealed

unto you it was like you thought that that was that was a two straight crushes nope seeing like like going back and seeing you know like you know pre-transition elliot page in like a suit in um inception oh shoot i forgot i forgot he was in that he wears a suit in inception a lot and you're like i was like this is really hot and now i know why the universe aligned the universe aligned for me um so but i i think to close that point i think we've actually we've sort of reached that point with superhero movies we're now on that downturn where people are finally

critiquing the genre which is something that we saw happen to westerns i think we also had a little bit with what i was going to call like prestige tv with like those sort of heroes and stuff because you eventually ended with it ended prestige tv with like um with like uh mad men and um and obviously and like the and and the keystone of it all breaking bad which like sort of critiques itself by the end like walter white's a horrible piece of shit oh yeah so like i think those once again lots of people still really like walter white despite him being a massive piece of skyler despite the fact that she was right the whole time anyway let's finish this essay what do we got here um and i thought this was a really interesting line talking about getting directly into his politics here um an anarchist is not a wild child but a mature realistic adult imposing

laws upon the self and modifying them according to an experience of life an interpretation of the world a rebel certainly he or she does not assume rebellious charm in order to placate authority which is what the rebel heroes of all these genre stories do there are always this comes a depressing point where robin hood doffs a respectful cap to king richard having clobbered the rival king lol there is a sort of implicit paternalism in um this sort of explicit implicit paternalism is seen in high relief in the currently popular star wars series which also presents a somewhat disturbing anti-rationalism in its quasi-religious force, which unites all the Jedi Knights. Back to Wellesley and Samurai.

Back to Wellesley and Samurai again. And upon whose power they can draw, like some holy brotherhood, some band of Knights Templar. Star Wars is a pure example of the genre, and that is a compendium of other people's ideas. I mean, that's yes it is in its implicit structure quasi children fighting for a paternalistic authority while when through in the end stand bashfully before their princess while medals are placed around their necks he starts off with a explicit call of like, this is what anarchism is. We're not just fucking children flailing our hands about.

Like, we're rational adults making rational decisions based on the worlds we see it. Like, with, again, self-imposed laws, self-imposed rules. Obviously, I think some anarchists would argue about calling it laws, but it's more of like an itself a self-imposed rule system yeah it's you on you guys there are plenty of lawful good anarchists yeah like you're following your your law um your laws but again going back here to talk about we talked about earlier that rebellious charm that in all these stories we have these rebel heroes and yet somehow they always end up being like oh yes king richard um i defer now to you robin hood was this abandoned outlaw robbing from the rich giving well he was he was a former noble former noble who was robbing from the rich giving to the poor and then as soon as the the right as soon as

aragorn shows up yeah he's like well actually you are the rightful king so and the person who was really doing bad was the bad guy who was taking charge while you were off on the crusades you know like the sheriff is the bad guy sheriff and king and John who but it's like the king was the one who appointed the goddamn sheriff in the first place by the ways so like

was sheriff and king appointed by John or by Richard who knows oh I don't but actually historically it's very funny. Even though people remember John as being this horrible piece of shit, if you actually look at him, he was fine. He was a normal king. He was just a normal king by most king standards. He just specifically a lot of the nobles didn't like him personally,

and they were the ones that wrote things down. And so he has this real negative connotation in history simply because a lot of the nobles did not personally like him um and richard the lionheart is actually kind of a piece of shit because he was crusading most of the time and only came to england like three times in his entire reign because he didn't want to be on that shitty washed out island the nobles were like we like this guy because he's never here he's not around to tell me what to do he's just off king john is trying to govern and we don't like just off you know uh killing middle eastern well no yeah he was out there like doing handshake deals with saladine like that's i'm pretty sure he was the same crusade when the saladine was there don't

come at me i don't remember there's a bunch of crusades and i didn't learn any of them i don't remember um they take some about star wars how star wars is basically just like quasi children and i do i do think this is one of the few moments when i actually kind of disagree with him but that's mostly because the empire strikes back like kind of takes the force and fleshes it out a lot more yeah i think this points to the fact that only the first movie had come out and they hadn't really um they i they hadn't really fleshed out what the force is yeah or how it works and because we all know the force we think of it's. Because we all know the Force.

We think of it. It's actually not like a thing that controls. It's a thing that flows through all living creatures and binds them, and you can sort of tap into it for purposes. But it does have a will of its own, but its will is towards peace and balance and yada, yada, yada yada yada now of course you could make the argument that because its version of peace and balance is a galactic neoliberal republic that maybe the force is kind of fucked up well you don't know if the force actually wants there to be a republic oh yeah that's true the force just wants there to be a balance between the light and the dark which like you could also interpret as uh as like a george lucas trying to interpret like daoism yeah i mean yeah which he interprets about with the same alacrity of purpose that he interprets almost anything else which is kind of poorly but yeah

effectively sometimes for storytelling purposes sometimes so like yeah i think he's a little off in his interpretation of the force but that's just because this is just the first star wars film which you could make i can see why he would take that from the first film like that's that's just because this is just the first Star Wars film, which you could make this into a movie. I can see why he would take that from the first film. And again, like we said, if the will of the Force is the Jedi Knights, maybe in fact the Force is kind of sucky. Because the Jedi Knights suck. Kind of suck. I think that's just a little more about the Force. I think we can probably skip that.

Let's get to the end of this essay. Let's get to the very end here. Let's read a little bit the meat the the the very end here let's let's read a little bit but oh no this retouches me he likes it's the next paragraph is him talking about something he likes um author named alfred bester who i've never heard of and he said this is what actually got him into science fiction um he he writes he wrote a story called um the stars my destination also called tiger tiger so in brief there's it's a space story um this guy gets a hold of a material called pyre or pyre that basically is capable of like destroying the planets with a thought. And all the powers, all the great powers, the governments and stuff,

keep trying to give it up to them for careful stewardship. And instead what the hero does is literally distributes it evenly to the public, allowing the public to take the future directly into their own hands. Yeah, in the end he scatters the stuff to the mob of the solar system. Here you are, he says, it's yours. It it's your destiny do with it how you see fit um i mean it's one of the very very few libertarian science fiction novels i've ever read if i hadn't read it i very much doubt i should have read any more science fiction it's a wonderful adventure story that is a hero developing from a completely stupefied illiterate hand on a spaceship to a brilliant and mature individual taking his revenge first

on those who have harmed him and then gradually developing what you might call a political conscience. I know of no other book. Which so thoroughly combines romance with an idealism almost wholly acceptable to me. It's probably significant that it enjoys a relatively small success compared to, say, Stranger in a Strange Land. Yeah, he's emblematic of the fact that even we did not know who this yeah literally i had no idea who that was i had no idea about that i guess we might have to read this story about a guy who like basically gives everyone a hand nuke and says the future's yours yeah i'm gonna be honest i'm an

anarchist i still don't think everyone should get a nuke. Yeah, but I mean, it makes sense what he's doing here. I get it. Because obviously the metaphor isn't actually like world destructive power or whatever thing. It's more about the redistribution of power in general. This is where we finally get to talk about. Okay. So the only. I promise.

We're almost done. We almost done through this essay. But he gets into, again, trying to talk about things he likes, trying to talk about authors. You can read that have like good politics and stuff. And I just really liked the way this pair of this paragraph starts. Cause it starts with a wonderful,

a little bit of a sentence here. Yeah. A little bit of an acknowledgement. It says, a little bit of an acknowledgment. It says, leaving aside the very worthy, but to my mind, journalistic, The Dispossessed by U.K. Le Guin. It's quite hard for me to find many other examples of science fiction books which, as it were, promote libertarian ideas. He's just like, listen, I know The Dispossessed. It's great. It's great.

As a little journalistic, it's great. But, you know. Besides that. Besides that. Because everybody kind of already knows what that one is. Because he knows everyone's going to go, what about the dispossessed? What about the dispossessed? He's like, yeah.

Besides the dispossessed. He's like, listen, guys, I love Le Guin. Like, just calm down. Besides that, everything else is hard to find. Yeah. And that's just because Le Guin got really popular writing pulp science fiction first and then occasionally and then eventually dipped into doing like polemics with like Left Handed Darkness and then eventually The Dispossessed, her most polemic, polemic-y polemic of them all. Yeah. So.

What he goes through now is a list of authors and their books, which I'm not going to go through. But his whole point is he keeps saying there are authors who are anarchist, who have heroes that are anarchist, and yet whose stories do not actually promote anarchist ideas. That despite saying they are and having characters that say they are, the ideas presented by these works actually are not. And if you think about it, it can be really hard if you're using established tropes to help you come up with a plot or, like, a story. It can be really hard just because of how infrequent, like, libertarian or anarchist, like, stylings are. It's, like, there's just not very many tropes that fit into the right, you know. Like, how many, like I mentioned before, how many chosen one stories are there? How many rightful king, rightful heir? How many stories about heroes becoming, assuming some kind of power or being a good good guy because he like adheres to the law.

It's like you have like a whole laundry list of tropes that fit, that are extremely popular, that fit almost exclusively non-anarchist storytelling. Yes. But not very many tropes that fit into anarchist storytelling just because there's so little of it. Yeah, and I think that's where he's pointing out. Like nobody knows who this other guy was. So even anarchists trying to write anarchist stories come up short because there's just not a well of popular,

well, like they haven't read enough of it. You know what I mean? It's like, it's like people read a lot of fashy science fiction. So it ends up in their writing um even if they're anarchists because like that's just the well they're drawing on yeah so if you guys want to go here and find a list of authors we're not going to list them all off because there's a

lot like a final paragraph here i think we can what heinlein or tolkien lack is any trace of real self-mockery i mean yeah tolkien was incredibly self-serious. Yeah. They are nature's urbane Tories. They'll put an arm around your shoulder and tell you their ideas are quite radical too, really. They used to be fire eaters in their youth. There are different ways of achieving social change. You must be realistic and pragmatic.

Okay, so... Next time you pick up a Heinlein book, think of the author as looking a bit like General Eisenhower. Or if that image isn't immediate enough, some chap in early middle age, good looking in a slightly soft way, with silver at the temples, a blue tie, a sober three-piece suit, telling you with a quiet smile that Margaret Thatcher cares for individualism and opportunity above all things, as passionately in her way as you do about yours and then you might have some idea of what you're actually about to read um yeah so this his conclusion here is essentially just pointing out that like a lot of authors like Heinlein or

Tolkien um don't have any self-mockery they're're extremely self-serious. There's an element of objective belief to their work that just goes completely unquestioned. And it's like they're charming. It's like they're really, just like these banded heroes, they're charming. And they'll put their arm around you and be like, my ideas are really radical.

Like, they're very radical, right? When in reality, it's like Margaret Thatcher in a trench coat. Yeah, like, well, when I was young, I was like you, too. And I got older and realized there's multiple ways you can go about doing societal change. Like, I've got radical ideas. I grew up and became a homeowner, and now I'm voting Tory. We can, you know what?

No, we can definitely improve the state in other ways besides violent revolution like we could vote it in or something we could uh listen guys like uh margaret thatcher cares a lot about your our individualism you know it's like very important that we are allowed to be our individual selves if your individual self is a landlord if your individual self is a uh white straight landlord um male um and a whole laundry list of other little caveats and check boxes that you have to tick off um in order for that to apply it's yeah so it's saying that they use these authors use these tropes that we're familiar with to kind of couch

their conservatism in language that can be interpreted as radical language that can be interpreted as revolutionary. And they use this as a way again, to come across as friendly and charming in their work and that what they're doing essentially lulling you into non-rebellion yeah like they're pacifying you um another tool of pacifism by the capitalist uh establishment i mean yeah it's it is yeah like oh yeah dude we're radical too like look at my work here like this this guy started off as like a beggar and he overthrew

the king i mean i'm gonna put the fact that he then became king himself and the system fundamentally did not change he didn't change for anyone for all the poor people he grew up with oh yeah uh they're all still poor but like he overcame it individualism which is literally just you know bootstrapping yourself feel like a magic sword yeah whatever i mean we've gone in depth when we talked about the shower about the fact that like all of like tolkien's individual heroes were all just rich fucks yeah they were all landed gentry minus sam they were all landed gentry like aragorn is of a secret race of kings who's inherently cooler and better than everyone else lego losses even even gimli's the son of an of a of an arabor dwarf that was incredibly wealthy gimli is the son of glowin

who's one of the members of the quest that retook arabor which immediately conferred upon them great station and wealth by being one of the the uh 13 dwarves well all of the people invited to the initial council of elrond were extremely high ranking wealthy people their kingdom and gimli came because gloan was too old to make the trip and gloan was important because he happened to be like thorin's uncle yeah and like they were the ones he was the uncle of the guy who was becoming king of the fucking treasure um legolas is a prince uh boromir is essentially a prince yeah he's a he's a prince prince regent he's a prince regent because the stewards weren't kings but they were kings yeah so like like every single person in the fellowship minus sam was noble nobility or an angel

is like rich or a noble or literally sent by god literally in a guardian angel ordained by by incarnate like deity an incarnate deity of of of grief i know we're going over talking a lot because for me this is like putting more cocks test to myself of the work that i love the work that i've taken a lot of meaning for in my life is me doing what Moorcock wants me to do I am doing the analysis of my favorite works and showing discovering where they fall flat and it's the fact that literally every hero in Tolkien's story aside from Sam has generational or inherited wealth and status yeah like sure aragorn spent a lot of his life poor and rugged in the woods but that's but because within him he had and he kind of did it by choice he could have stayed in he could have lived in rivendell he could have stayed

in rivendell his whole life if he wanted but he was like no i have to go out and protect people and that's him giving his like it's the pater paternalism. Yeah. Where he's, yeah, he's, he's taking on the burden of protecting the Shire. Yeah. Yeah. The Shire and like that entire, like an Arab or like, sorry, um, area door, the Western part. So like, and even then he, he, he, he, he gets to do that because of his blood fucking King Charles over here.

Yeah. With his fucking little sausage fingers like wielding a sword and people be like oh but king charles was really critical of like imperialism and critical it's like i really don't give a shit he's still a king he just dissolved the monarchy what i'm really hoping is that this our newest the newest king charles has a reign as successful as the previous two charleses oh jesus if you don't know history kids google it yeah sorry to all of our uh actually not sorry to all of our british listeners who came here from uh uh like the color of the color of magic the

light fantastic um sorry your monarchy is stupid and ridiculous uh as is any monarchy as is all monarchies and the fact that people are getting arrested for saying there shouldn't be a monarchy is exactly the example of why there shouldn't be a monarchy. Well, the monarchy is only symbolic. Then why are people getting arrested for critiquing it? I say anyone who listens to our podcast isn't going to be pro monarchy. Yeah. We're surprised that we think this.

Yeah. It's very funny, though. Again, may his reign be. Stop crying about a woman who didn't give a rat's ass about who you were. May he may his reign be as successful as the previous Charles's. The queen was great. Well, the queen didn't dissolve the monarchy, so she wasn't great. Sorry.

So we've gone on for a little while. We just read large sections from this essay, but I think this is important because what he says specifically is important to talk about. And also he's a good writer, so his anecdotes and things are about. And also he's just, he's a good writer. So like his anecdotes and things are fun. Yeah. He's a funny guy.

It. And as I've rambled on, but y'all can realize that I've been doing this to myself since I read this essay for the first time is that a lot of the things that are your favorites are probably bad. Yeah. A little problematic fools i i again i he wouldn't tell me that i'm not allowed to enjoy lord of the rings more cock wouldn't say that i can't enjoy it more cock would be mad if i tried to argue which i will

probably do in a later episode that you can take revolutionary or radical ideas from Lord of the Rings or he would point out the fact that the reason I can do that is because the the structure of the story and the wording is so vague that I can pull a definition myself despite that not being intended by the author yeah and that it's still fundamentally kind of a dangerous work it's a dangerous work for me to pull lessons from a story that inherently is opposed to my ideas. Yeah. So, like, I think he'd, like, more or less be accepting of the fact that I am conscious that I'm doing this. It is a conscious choice on my part to recognize the work as reactionary and to still try and pull meaning from it

myself, even though he'd argue that I should just read something better. I mean, yeah, he'd probably be like, yeah, just, I mean,

we, we are going to spend another episode here talking about like when, um, I was gonna say when you, we could just read something better, uh, which we do do by reading Ursula Le Guin. Yeah.

Which is better. Yeah. By, by, you know, reading the Gwynn by eventually readingula Le Guin. Yeah. Which is better. Yeah. By, by, you know, reading the Gwynn by eventually reading Moorcock. Yeah. Once we get around to that,

that'll be, that'll have to be after October. Yeah. After November, after November. That's right. It has to be after November. Um,

I don't really have any final thoughts. I think we've covered just about everything. Like just be more critical of your, be more critical of the media you consume and not just like the message of this specific story is bad but like did the author even intend for this to not be bad like what is the intent of the author behind this work it is see often bad yeah the i still i still cannot fathom the apologia for Heinlein, even for Stranger in a Strange Land, because I can't.

Anyone who has ever read Starship Troopers and liked it is just fash, because there's no way around that at all in that book. There's not even a good plot. So the only reason that you're liking it is because it has ideas that you agree with which are all bad so like like um there are some there are some like starship troopers that are really easy to point out and really easy to find because they're so glaringly obvious about it but then there are you know there are others like... Anne McCaffrey, Larry Niven,

all these other people who it's not as easy to see the conservative and reactionary politics that are embedded within the story. If you really want to read a book about soldiers in space going through boot camp and then going to war with aliens, read Liberty or death by joe kasabian it's better it's more well written than uh starship troopers and actually gives you

a pretty bit much better look about how much it sucks yeah to be in the military and how stupid the whole concept of space imperialism uh would be so you know like go read joe kasabian's books they're better um and you can still get your fix on about like watching a soldier go through boot camp yeah but with an actual plot with an actual plot and that isn't just about how we should spank our kids harder and written by a guy who actually went through boot camp and have actually participated yeah and not and not a uh and not a guy who was a Navy Reserve engineer who just kind of like sat on a boat before computers were a thing and looked at an astrolabe and then left before any wars happened.

Read the book from the guy who like got deployed to Afghanistan twice. Yeah. Not the one who was on a ship in the interwar period. He was a fucking loser. Anyway, no other final thoughts. Not the one who was on a ship in the interwar period. Loser. Fucking loser. Anyway, no other final thoughts. Again, I know we read like half the essay to you,

but you can read it in like 15 minutes. It's really good. And you really should use it as a springboard to critique the stories that you read. Again, it's not that you can't enjoy them. You just have to be conscious and recognize them for what they are. Oh, yeah. And don't mistake their message for something more radical than it actually is.

Like, like even like he talks about when he's talking about Westerns, he talks about like true grit and how people like to, you know, idolize a rooster Coburn as this like rugged, like rugged individualist hero. And at the end, he's still at the end of the day like submits to the authority of a judge yeah so like it's still there it's like it's it's this like they're a they're a rebel but not not that much of a rebel that they would that they would be against the law when the law in quotation marks is right um insert chomsky's justified hierarchies yeah lol get wrecked genocide denier goodbye goodbye um thank you all for listening uh i don't know depending on what order these come out in i don't know what's next after this but october but october's grim fantasy month yeah october is grim fantasy month november is

going to be cyberpunk month yeah so uh get ready for those and i hope you also enjoyed uh tombs of atuan by ursula le guin which should come out before this might come out after this i don't know depending on the order we record and release it in, but also read the Gwyn. Yeah, just, just read the Gwyn. It's just fun. And their books are usually short. Her longest books are her short story collections. Okay.

Goodbye. Bro. bro are you fucking real man come on