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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29417 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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This might be a bit weak for a top post but I find the idea interesting. Some spoilers for books mentioned within. Let me know if I should delete an repost on Friday fun or something.

So I've been reading /r/printsf a bit lately. I notice that what left wingers there consider to be left wing novels is noticeably different from what I would consider to be left wing novels.

One topic that comes up occasionally is "Can you recommend a left wing sci fi book".

A common recommendation is the Murderbot series. The thing is I don't find the books themselves to be very left wing.

The universe is definitely built on leftish tropes. Many of the characters are from world of libleft hippie scientists who form polycule marriages and the broader universe, or at least the outer rim, is run by evil corporations. I'll use "he" to refer to Murderbot because it flows better and it's fun to be a bit of a jerk.

There's a chunk of the fandom that like to insert gender identity issues that aren't really present in the novels themselves. They post about how Muderbot should be referred to as 'it' and would be very upset if someone thought of his as male.

However my take away was that Murderbot is a fusion of cloned human tissue and cybernetics and has no gender identity whatsoever. He has no sex drive and finds the idea of an organic grinding against him sexually really gross.

In one of the later books when he's forced to check a box about his gender at customs he checks "none".

But at no point is he ever upset about what gender humans try to classify him as, it's just completely meaningless to him. Also they should keep their filthy genitals off of him.

The plots are generally Murderbot trying to survive, to investigate his past, or to save his friends. So those all strike me as politically neutral.

Now there is a book that I'd classify as extremely left wing, to the point that I was kind of offended by it.

It's Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Actually big spoilers for this one.

The message of the book is a very Brockmanish "We should submit to forced modification by our new spider overlords".

The generally plot is that the last group of humans are refugees on a space convoy. Where most of them were cryogenically frozen. Their last hope is to try to set up a colony on a world they run into that was artificially terraformed. The terraforming accidentally created super intelligent spiders who have been living there. The book ends with the spiders forcibly genetically modifying the humans so that the humans won't find them so terrifying.

The humans are presented as terrible in a way that comes of as propagandistic. The spiders are presented in a much more sympathetic fashion.

Now I have issues with spiders and many of my best friends are human, so this bothered me.

A key theme is being forced to overcome disgust, which I'd classify as extremely progressive coded.

If you swapped out some of the actors and phrased it as refugees should be forced to change to be compatible with the current population it would be seen as incredibly racist. So that makes the message sound even more progressively coded to me.

I really honestly thought that the Murderbot series was making fun of leftists and that the show was too. I guess it was kind of a reverse Poe's Law situation where I read sincere views that seemed ridiculous to me as a satire of those views.

The universe is definitely built on leftish tropes.

This is just more and more hilarious as I think back on the murderbot novels I read (a total of 5 of them i think).

One of the aspects of the setting is that the leftist little utopia planet gets to exist mostly because a larger capitalist/corportist system allows it to exist, and indirectly supports its existence. It has the same vibes as a small town deciding to be a little communist commune inside America. The town can survive with a totally anemic economy, because the rest of America is producing food and consumer products at such dirt cheap prices. The town only needs to export and trade a little to keep afloat.

The leftist planet utopia in the novels is in a very similar situation. They can't do anything complex without help from the corporate system. They want to explore a planet for a possible colonization effort. But they can't produce the spaceships to get there. They can't produce the surveying and survival equipment they need on the planet. And they can't produce the security they need while on the planet (they are so naive they aren't even aware enough to realize they need security). They are helpless kids being given expensive toys.

They are left alone on their planet not because they are strong enough to deter aggression, but because they are so poor and backwards that they have nothing worth stealing.

You went over some of the relationship stuff that happens in the novel. It has what I feel is an accurate level of interpersonal drama among sexually fluid and diverse crew (aka a lot of drama). And the main narrator of the story, the murderbot, sees all this drama as pointless and stupid, especially in the face of life-or-death stakes.

To me its a story about some incompetent leftists that are overly focused on pointless and stupid interpersonal drama that get saved by a hyper-competent corporate slave (and then in later novels its an ex-slave). If this is what passes for leftist literature, then maybe I need to go back through some of the stuff I've dismissed. Or maybe the lesson is that as long as the author says the correct things in interviews they can absolutely trash leftists with impunity (are we sure the author isn't a closeted pro-capitalist?).

I really honestly thought that the Murderbot series was making fun of leftists and that the show was too.

It is, but there's noticeable difference between people poking fun at themselves and outsiders mocking them. Murderbot is, IMO, very clearly the former; this is pretty noticeable if you compare how right-wing sci-fi would/has portrayed a similar group of characters.

I'd also note that it paints an extremely rosy picture of the Preservation Alliance society as being a functionally utopian society with complete abundance of core needs and functionally zero crime.

(are we sure the author isn't a closeted pro-capitalist?)

I think it's more that insiders don't realize how ridiculous they look to people who don't share their assumptions and blindspots.

I agree that the books are surely making fun of progressives, though Murderbot also finds the crew members to be cute, and wants to protect their foolish existences. The overall worldview of the books reads to me as sympathetic towards progressives, while also recognising that the capitalists, while unpleasant, better understand the brute realities of the world.

This paradox is what makes the story interesting.

I found the ending of Children of Time unsatisfying, despite liking the book overall, because it was played as a surprise deus ex machina without really grappling with IMO bigger questions about tolerance. It had the chance to philosophically defend Fully Automated Gay Space Communism neoliberal tolerance, but opted instead to choose tolerance-by-force. If I were being uncharitable, I'd compare it to the Bush Administration waltzing into Afghanistan and expecting one weird trick (schools for girls) to trigger a warm embrace of Western values.

I've written about the murderbot series before.

Short version, it's pretty straightforward pro-communist/anti-capitalist propaganda, and the author herself makes absolutely no secret of this.

I made a project of reading through some of the classic sci fi I hadn't read before a few years ago and most of it I liked, some I loved, some I thought was meh, but there was only one classic I loathed and that was Childhood's End. It was very pro transhumanism and viewed the entirety of humanity changing to the point they are no longer meaningfully human as a win whereas I see it as mass suicide. The spiders genetically alter the humans plot reminded me of this.

I felt the same about Childhood’s End. Some part of it has got to be down to the two world wars and a visceral sense of ‘anything must be better than this’ but there have always been people who would prefer not-humanity to humanity. More extreme members of the environmental movement for example.

Even anti-humanist treehuggers must be unhappy as the departing children consume/annihilate all of Earth in the end. Whales? Gone. Fellow apes? Gone. Plants? Gone. The simplest earth bacteria? It’s life force sucked away by greedy trance children devoid of any humanity. I found that really depressing as the end of creation. I hate-read the book and I hate that this disgust seared the plot into my brain.

Its only value is as an unintended metaphor for the destruction of the then coming boomer generation.

I tried the first Murderbot book and didn't much like it. It was very, uh, without being too uncharitable or invoking a @WhiningCoil rant, "female coded." The whole "found family" thing and the fact that progressives can read whatever gender politics they want into an asexual combat droid who presents as gruff and hard and just cannot with these stupid humans but actually has a soft gooey core is why they consider it leftist.

These people need to read them some Ursula Le Guin.

But Children of Time is one of my favorite modern SF books, so we're gonna fight.

Okay, not really. But - I will concede that Adrian Tchaikovsky is probably left-leaning. He cultivates a fairly inoffensive and apolitical social media presence, though what hints he has dropped indicate that he's generally on the progressive spectrum. His books are mostly not didactic or obvious in their politics, but again, tend to be vaguely progressive in their sentiments.

However, while I agree that the "solution" in Children of Time, forced genetic behavioral modification, was kind of horrific, it also made sense from the spiders' POV, and the humans were mostly villains escaping from an authoritarian system. I didn't read this as Tchaikovsky saying something about humanity's true inherent nature, but rather it was about these particular humans presenting an existential threat to the spiders, and the spiders coming up with a solution that wasn't "One of us must exterminate the other." It was actually a rather clever and very sf-ish solution.

I don't see this as particularly "progressive" coded, unless anything that doesn't end in military conflict is "progressive." I don't see overcoming disgust as inherently progressive coded. Maybe you think becoming comfortable with sentient spiders was supposed to be a metaphor for becoming comfortable with gays and trans, or with Muslim immigrants? I certainly didn't read it that way.

Also, spiders are fucking cool.

The rest of the series is also pretty good, though not as good as the first book.

Of course it makes sense from the spider's POV, but the final part of the conflict is from Holsten's, and his internal monologue is about rejecting his brutish human nature and meekly accepting his new spider overlords instead of going down swinging at a time where they don't know anything about the spider's plans, just that they boarding the ship and injecting everyone with something making people catatonic.

Like, I enjoy his sci-fi worldbuilding and nonhumans, but I would consider his books extremely obvious in their politics, especially because he has real trouble writing compelling villains that don't come across as political pointscoring. Though Chlidren of Time isn't nearly the worst at this, except the embarrassing opening NUN cameo.

Red, green and blue mars are pretty lefty and very good. Maybe not modern left enough, but having (at least three) main characters rant uninterrupted about the evils of capitalism for several pages should count.

But Children of Time is one of my favorite modern SF books, so we're gonna fight.

Have you noticed that Tchaikovsky has kind of collapsed into telling a single story lately? I finished Shroud recently, and it seems like he's using the AND THEN SUDDENLY THERE WAS AN EMERGENT COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS trope more frequently.

YMMV - I am extremely high on the Tyrant Philosophers, though that's fantasy so maybe it doesn't apply.

My biggest criticism of Tchaikovsky is that his narrative voice is kind in a sour spot; it is strong enough that it stands out and overshadows character voice, but it's not really distinctive enough to carry weight (contrast with, idk, Neal Stephenson).

I've heard good things about it, but the synopses I've seen feel like the target market is atheists who like dungeons and dragons a lot. I only really meet one of those criteria, so I'm a little wary. Is that too uncharitable of a description?

I don't really think that's right. There are militant atheists, but they're the villains. Granted, the dynamics of religious faith are a little different when God turns up for major holidays and performs incontrovertible miracles. The D&D comparison I can see, in that it's got more than a whiff of D&D-style kitchen sink fantasy (each book is set in a different locale with its own idiosyncratic fantasy elements) in the setting.

Tyrant Philosophers

It's coming up in my reading backlog, can you elevator pitch it so I can building anticipation?

Tchaikovsky churns out novels at Brandon Sanderson speed. He's a better writer than Sanderson, but it is starting to show.

But, if someone is asking for left wing recommendations, those people probably explained their reasoning to some level. Seems like that would be more interesting than the books themselves

You'd think, but they really didn't so the thread was pretty unsatisfying.

I was afraid to probe exactly what flavour of leftism they were looking for because the sub bans political drama and I'm almost certain to say the wrong thing.

Eastern bloc science fiction is worth checking out. Stanislaw Lem is my favorite of these, but there's some cool soviet writers as well.

If we're going down the Soviet Sci-Fi rabbit hole Alexander Bogdanov's Red Star is an interesting glimpse into the mind of someone who truly believes in the glorious revolution and is extrapolating forward while still being a solid-story teller in his own right.

I'll never turn down an excuse to recommend Roadside Picnic.

It's an unexpected case of the book being better than the movie, because when that movie is fucking Stalker that's a serious accolade.

Roadside Picnic

I have to wonder how many of the developers of various clones/knockoffs of the Stalker video games are aware of the franchise's origins.

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