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