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There were women writers back in the 50s and 60s doing the same kind of SF along the lines of planetary romances but while they may have been more on the politically progressive side, they weren't the above kind of 'sit around and talk about things'. [Leigh Brackett] wrote a series about a kind of Conanesque figure from an inhabited Mercury, Eric John Stark. He may sympathise with the native species being displaced by Terran colonisers, but his solution is to run guns to them, not deliver lectures.
C.L. Moore was another woman writer, with Northwest Smith being another one of the space opera heroes. They were writing alongside male writers such as E.E. Smith and in similar genres, and I'd read ten knock-off versions of Shambleau, outdated Freudian symbolism and all, before I'd read anything by Ruthanna.
Leigh Brackett definitely wasn’t on the progressive side. Her The Ginger Star series was very explicitly anti-communist and there are heavy BDSM themes as well throughout.
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I'm not defending the quality of her work or saying it's the only kind of writing female sci-fi authors can produce. I just suspect the modal fiction purchaser in 2023 is a woke woman and the publishing industry reflects that. This is a counterpoint to a lot of other spaces where wokeness is a top down imposition.
The only 2023 Hugo nominee I've read was "Babel, or the Necessity of Violence" and that's a female written alt-history that basically endorses terroristic violence against civilians in a colonizing empire. I'm solidly on the left and I found the extent to which the author's politics made the plot predictable disappointing, though it's definitely not a "sit around and talk" novel. The magic system was a pretty cool idea though.
I initially interpreted this the other way, like a Churchillian call for those savages in Mesopotamia to be bombed until they submit.
Yeah no that would be amusing. It's more like let the people of London suffer because the Opium trade exists. They don't actually do violence they just stop preventing bad things from happening.
Imo part of the problem is that the author is Chinese and so her go to example of colonialism is treaty ports and opium. This is a lot less compelling an example of colonial atrocity than the Belgian congo or the good old fashioned slave trade. Give me some handless magic user from the Congo laying waste to Brussels on his way to King Leopold and I'd be more behind it.
Meanwhile in mainland China, we have stories which smile upon outright genocide. I'd love to send the PC police to take a look at what goes on in webnovels over there - problematic content as far as the eye can see!
Of the two Chinese stories I really like, Reverend Insanity, has just about every ism you could imagine, save transphobia. There's probably some of that too, given it's basically in the 'girdle of change gender' stage of gender awareness. We've got varied and exciting kinds of racism between humans and variant humans, those from different regions, sexism, homophobia, plenty of slavery, wanton slaughter. And yet that's really just the backdrop to what the author's actually trying to say politically about individuality and following one's own path.
Then there's the Three Body Problem series, which goes pretty hard on the 'do not let women have positions of power, don't let your civilization turn into a feminized race of soyboys or you will face complete extermination' angle.
I'm mildly more positively inclined to those with their own ideas or even rabid Chinese nationalists than those like this woman who come to the West and then vomit our own ideas about anti-colonialism back against us, when their home countries are behaving far more outrageously.
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I consider 3BP to be more nuanced than that. Liu quite directly says that humans that rejected their soy/lunar/yin aspect to survive became a different civilization. It's the combination of both soy and chad that makes humanity humanity, even if dooms it on a galactic scale. And even then, there's Yun Tianming, soyboy extraordinaire, who achieves much more than Thomas Wade the gigachad, who is ultimately too lawful stupid, too proud to succeed.
If it weren't for Wade failing, Yun Tianming would've been superfluous. Humanity as a whole didn't listen to him anyway and put in the work to be safe. Sure, Wade was wrong to listen to Ms 'I will never do anything correctly' but at least his instincts and goals were right. He would've made a much better Swordholder, as remarked by the Trisolarans.
To me survival is an unalloyed good. Even if you have everything else, happiness and freedom and prosperity and eudaimonia but you don't survive... then it's still a failure. Those chapters of misery and slaughter of the post-scarcity society and relocation to Australia were haunting. They should've woken up after that. If that didn't make them take things a bit more seriously, then what would? I can't fathom a civilization who thinks 'oh we'll just hide behind Jupiter against an enemy with STAR-BUSTER ATTACKS'. If nothing else, they could just fire 2 or 3 more shots at the gas giants!
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Good lord that meme is top notch. Never thought this of all places is where I’d find a high tier cultivation meme. Impressive.
Saw it on /r/martialmemes, also on 4chan a couple of times.
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ngmi
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