I did a podcast last weekend that focused on how the broligarchs miss the point when it comes to most science fiction, including the stuff they cite as influencing them. This was BCube Press podcast hosted by Cliff Winnig with myself and Wendy Shaffer as guests. You can watch it here on YouTube.
We had a great discussion, but there’s so much to be said on this topic, plus right now I’m reading Gil Duran’s new book The Nerd Reich, so I’m thinking a lot about what these technofeudalists are doing to undermine democracy based on their half-baked philosophy and complete misunderstanding of both science and science fiction.
(I’ll write about The Nerd Reich when I finish the book, but I can already tell you it’s worth your time even if you, like me, are obsessed with the subject and already know a lot of this. Duran is a journalist by training, so he marshals his facts and writes with clarity.)
Back when I was in college – an absurdly long time ago – there were four SF/F books (or series of books) that pretty much everybody read: the Foundation trilogy, Stranger in a Strange Land, Dune, and the Lord of the Rings. Those books didn’t get me into SF/F – that came later when I discovered the great feminist SF of the 70s – but they were part of the overall 60s-70s culture.
What gets me is that the broligarch crowd pretty much read the same books – and clearly missed the point of most of them – even though the oldest of those tech-adjacent guys is probably a generation younger than I am and many of them are millennials. And of course, Foundation and Lord of the Rings had been around quite awhile before my generation found them.
Now I’m not dissing those books. I embroidered a quote from Foundation on the backpack I carried when I went hitch-hiking across the country (“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”) I worked as a children’s book buyer for Grok Books (which didn’t have a great SF section, but did have that particular novel).
And I re-read the entire Lord of the Rings during law school finals every semester.
Dune was fun if you were smoking a lot of dope.
But you know, all those books were written before any of these guys were born. And there’s been a hell of a lot of good science fiction written since then. Yet these books still seem to attract their interest. Continue reading “The Broligarch Misreading of Science Fiction”…