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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 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.
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