Ironically enough, they consistently ignore a REAL master of both science fiction and hard science, Isaac Asimov, who once said “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.�

True enough. As long as it is peaceful. Violence, however, is the first resort of the competent when some incompetent idiot goes violent. Trying to ‘reason’ is the sign of incompetence at that point.

Anyone else ever hear of this? I have no idea who wrote it. I don’t even recall where I read it, if it was in a mag or an anthology.”

“Ubermensch!” by Kim Newman:

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?72687

snip

Neal Stephenson
Richard K. Morgan”

With all due respect, Stephenson expressed some rather odd ideas in THE DIAMOND AGE about the distribution of civil responsibility wrt population density in one of his books [1] and Morgan dedicated MARKET FORCES to the works of people like Chomsky and Moore (but not, oddly, Steve Jackson [2], despite the strong similarity to CAR WARS). At the risk of appearing to be some kind of wild-eyed centrist, it would not surprise me if on close examination, Stephenson was perhaps just a tad to the city-hating right and Morgan was not slightly inclined towards the anti-globalist left.

1: Roughly “If there was a catastrophic plane crash in a major American city, those self-centered urbanites wouldn’t put their lattes/stolen TVs down to help the victims, unlike we stalwart flat-staters.”

2: Or to Alan Dean Foster or Harlan Ellison, who got there before SJ.

I may not approach the subject of religion or spiritual thought from anything nearing the direction Card does, but I still thought that what he said was important and very well presented. Perhaps all of his views aren’t representative of anyone but himself, but he has come up with at least one politically oriented (or perhaps a better phrase would be “policy oriented”) screed which I, who consider myself a progressive liberal really enjoyed and agreed with fully. In fact I still share it with my friends (I live in Kansas, so the topic still ranks high on my list of important issues).

I can say that on at least the topic of the value and purpose of public education (one of the pillar issues of the progressive movement), OSC represents the view from the left admirably.

I can’t speak to anything else he’s said since I’ve only read a few of his fiction books and nothing else he has written. However, I imagine that if I sat on the far right and were a Christian fundamentalist, I would consider Card to be on “the other side.”

Seriously, TOP and Card are two of a kind – anything goes, freedom is wonderful, America is the land of liberty, and all of us are created equal – as long as my privilege isn’t threatened.

C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, is much less well known than the Narnia books. By the third book, deservedly.

Allegory began to take over Perelandra, but by Hideous Strength, the baddies are Big Government caricatures, Ransom becomes an archetypal Marty Sue, and the plot descends into Lovecraftian gibbering horror, involving modern art as well as perverted science. An anti-feminist fate awaits the female protagonist Jane.

Kathleen, many thanks for mentioning my fav SF author. Bujold write the best dialog in scifi, for my money.

I’m going to plug a friend of mine, Jo Walton (who also has a ), specifically for her most recent novel, Farthing, an alternate-history novel about fascism in Britain that undermines all the coziness of the English country-house mystery. (Her other published stuff is mostly fantasy, for those who care about that distinction.)

Now, like all Republicans I have ever met, OSC has refused to face the obvious and deal with his inner demons and instead has embraced right-wing extremism in a vain attempt to supress his homoerotic fantasies. And his creativity has suffered mightily for having separated critical parts of his own psyche from his primary mind.

So we get this kind of reverse fantasy where he assigns his own right-wing blood-lust to the pacifist inheritors of Ghandian and Kingian non-violence.

I can’t remember the last time we had a liberal group that advocated violence, not since the Weathermen of the ’70s, but we have lots of examples of right-wing terrorists. The latest being that guy in TN that wanted to blow up Congress with a chemical weapon suitcase bomb. Sounds like terrorism doesn’t it? But this guy was not charged with as a terrorist, nor is this triumph of police work mentioned in the Conservative Controlled Media (CNN, etc.) because this guy is a white conservative christian!

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2006/11/other-kind-of-terror_30.html

Right-wing extremists like 95% of the pundits on TV and on the radio all believe that liberals must also have fantasies about killing their neighbors, as they do, so we crap like this book from Card where it’s liberals that are the bad guys despite Reality proving that it’s white christians that are the most violent terrorists in this country today.

Dhalgren.

nolo beat me to it.

“Tune in next week, same bat-shit channel, same ape-shit time!!!!”

The fact that he wrote well and wrote engaging fiction doesn’t make him an authority on anything… except, of course, for his own books. But I think it’s a shame if his ridiculous political views turn people off of his books, because there are some that are definitely worth reading.