{"id":4788,"date":"2026-08-21T02:01:18","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T10:01:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/?p=4788"},"modified":"2026-08-20T16:08:29","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T00:08:29","slug":"the-broligarch-misreading-of-science-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/2026\/08\/21\/the-broligarch-misreading-of-science-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"The Broligarch Misreading of Science Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/a><\/p>\n

We had a great discussion, but there\u2019s so much to be said on this topic, plus right now I\u2019m reading Gil Duran\u2019s new book The Nerd Reich<\/i>, so I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

(I\u2019ll write about The Nerd Reich<\/i> when I finish the book, but I can already tell you it\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n

Back when I was in college \u2013 an absurdly long time ago \u2013 there were four SF\/F books (or series of books) that pretty much everybody read: the Foundation<\/i> trilogy, Stranger in a Strange Land<\/i>, Dune<\/i>, and the Lord of the Rings<\/i>. Those books didn\u2019t get me into SF\/F \u2013 that came later when I discovered the great feminist SF of the 70s \u2013 but they were part of the overall 60s-70s culture.<\/p>\n

What gets me is that the broligarch crowd pretty much read the same books \u2013 and clearly missed the point of most of them \u2013 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<\/i> and Lord of the Rings<\/i> had been around quite awhile before my generation found them.<\/p>\n

Now I\u2019m not dissing those books. I embroidered a quote from Foundation on the backpack I carried when I went hitch-hiking across the country (\u201cViolence is the last refuge of the incompetent.\u201d) I worked as a children\u2019s book buyer for Grok Books (which didn\u2019t have a great SF section, but did have that particular novel).<\/p>\n

And I re-read the entire Lord of the Rings<\/i> during law school finals every semester.<\/p>\n

Dune<\/i> was fun if you were smoking a lot of dope.<\/p>\n

But you know, all those books were written before any of these guys were born. And there\u2019s been a hell of a lot of good science fiction written since then. Yet these books still seem to attract their interest. <\/p>\n

Why, I\u2019m not really sure. I can\u2019t get over the fact that Thiel and his cohort call their surveillance company Palentir, after the device used by Saruman in the Lord of the Rings<\/i>. Saruman, who was corrupted by using the device and became a pawn of the evil Sauron.<\/p>\n

I find it hard to believe anybody reads Superman comics and wants to be Lex Luther, but at least Lex Luther, like Sauron, is the head honcho bad guy. Who reads Lord of the Rings<\/i> and wants to be Saruman?<\/p>\n

I gather at least some of them read Neal Stephenson\u2019s Snow Crash<\/i>, but again they missed the point. They act like they might have read the cyberpunks, though if they did read William Gibson, they don\u2019t seem to have understood a thing.<\/p>\n

And they clearly haven\u2019t read Ursula K. Le Guin or Octavia Butler, not to mention Joanna Russ or C.J. Cherryh.<\/p>\n

Cherryh wrote a lot of books in which human beings were traveling in space and living on other planets and even the ones that don\u2019t include some of her fascinating aliens rarely present human space exploration in the most flattering of lights.<\/p>\n

Then of course, we get to more recent times, though I suppose the Murderbot books would hit a little close to home to people who want the world \u2013 and the universe \u2013 run by corporations. You\u2019d think they\u2019d like the tech, though, even if does require creating cyborg creatures that have some human parts.<\/p>\n

Of course, given the incredible levels of misogyny that run through the broligarch crowd \u2013 they keep saying the 19th Amendment was a mistake \u2013 it\u2019s not a surprise that they don\u2019t read books by women. But it\u2019s not like there aren\u2019t some good male authors out there that they\u2019ve managed to avoid as well. Gibson, as I\u2019ve mentioned. Kim Stanley Robinson. China Mieville.<\/p>\n

Still, I don\u2019t suppose the broligarchs are interested in reading any books that might challenge their ideas. They\u2019re convinced they\u2019re smarter than everyone else and most of them seem to think the bulk of the human race, not to mention all other life on this planet, is irrelevant or, at best, NPCs.<\/p>\n

In fact, some of them think the planet itself is irrelevant, despite the fact that we exist because we evolved on this planet and with the other life forms on it, which makes it an ideal environment for us if we\u2019ll stop fucking it up.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re obsessed with living on other planets and with humanity \u2013 or perhaps artificial life forms they invent (that\u2019s not exactly clear) \u2013 taking over the universe.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think the universe needs taking over by any one form of life, and particularly not deluded programmer-adjacent power-driven greed heads who don\u2019t even understand what it means to be human.<\/p>\n

As Adam Becker \u2013 who is an astrophyscist \u2013 keeps pointing out, they can\u2019t do if anyway. The science isn\u2019t there. It\u2019s not just an engineering problem.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another important point, one that they really keep overlooking. Science fiction isn\u2019t about the future; it\u2019s about the present. That\u2019s particularly obvious in Gibson\u2019s work, some of which is very much set in the day after tomorrow, but it\u2019s more than that.<\/p>\n

As Ursula Le Guin says in a delightful essay published as a forward in the 1976 paperback edition of The Left Hand of Darkness<\/i>:<\/p>\n

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She ends that essay with these words:<\/p>\n

The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.<\/p>\n

A metaphor for what?<\/p>\n

If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I wouldnt not have written all these words, this novel; and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and used up my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly, that the truth is a matter of the imagination.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,17,7],"tags":[971,1239,1238,963],"class_list":["post-4788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fantasy","category-rants","category-sciencefiction","tag-broligarchs","tag-foundation","tag-the-lord-of-the-rings","tag-ursula-k-le-guin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4788"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4788\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4790,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4788\/revisions\/4790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}