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PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   27283 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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There's a goldilocks zone between "obnoxiously poisoned by leftism" and "Randian libertarian blowhard" in SciFi.

...I haven't exactly found it yet, but it has to be there.

Heinlein's cocktail of beliefs is at least bizarre enough to be more entertaining than irritating.

Jerry Pournelle has at least an interesting ideology that shows through his writing.

Honestly never heard of him. But he has short stories which are enticing as a sample. Really I'd like more good apostolic Christian sci fi.

If you find Heinlein entertaining, you might look at Pournelle & Niven's "The Mote In God's Eye"; Heinlein helped with the editing and called it "a very important novel, possibly the best contact-with-aliens story ever written". It's had 50 years to be surpassed, but I'd still say it's top-five and I think most people would say top-ten or at least top-20.

It's definitely not explicitly Christian sci-fi - Niven is (or at least at one point was; he doesn't talk about religion much) an atheist, one of the main characters is Muslim, and there's not anything theological about the plot. But it's set in a world of Pournelle's where humanity is under the aegis of a mostly-Catholic empire, and both that and Islam have an impact on the story; it's definitely not just religion of the Star Trek "how cute; they'll grow out of that soon" or "look they made a cult around some aliens" varieties (though there's one of the latter too).

Pournelle is great, but he is at his best when he is collaborating with Larry Niven; try Lucifer's Hammer for a standalone novel that is not part of a larger universe.

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