Book Review: Jorge Luis Borges - This Craft of Verse

Every Borges lecture is always a treat (see also the superb lecture collection Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature), so thankfully this recent transcription of a series of rediscovered lectures Borges gave at Harvard in the 60s has been made available to us. Not only was he one of the greatest writers of all time, but such a generous reader and riveting speaker that it's impossible to not want to immediately jump on everything he references. I do think his modesty is often comical, as in his occasional phrasings of "oh, I may have forgotten this minor detail", when the reader knows full well that he delivered these multilingual, polyphonic, omnierudite lectures based solely on memory without any notes at all, but his humble and self-effacing demeanor is so sincere, and his passion for literature so genuine, that it would be crazy to not give him the same charity as he gives his audience. Even the titles of the half-dozen lectures here are intriguing - "The Riddle of Poetry", "The Metaphor", "The Telling of the Tale", "Word: Music and Translation", "Thought and Poetry", and "A Poet's Creed" - but to actually read them (or hear them; the whole thing is on YouTube) is to be transported into the presence of someone who is overflowing with pleasure at the inexhaustible joys that come from the simple act of reading really fine literature. Here are some choice quotes that I enjoyed in the course of reading it, but the thing has to be experienced in its completeness because there's insights on every page:

Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies - for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry - I say to myself, "What a pity I can't buy that book, for I already have a copy at home."

If we think of the novel and the epic, we are tempted into thinking that the chief difference lies in the difference between verse and prose, in the difference between singing something and stating something. But I think there is a greater difference. The difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is the hero - a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character.

Walter Pater wrote that all art aspires to the condition of music. The obvious reason (I speak as a layman of course) would be that, in music, form and substance cannot be torn asunder. Melody, or any piece of music, is a pattern of sounds and pauses unwinding itself in time, a pattern that I do not suppose can be torn. The melody is merely the pattern, and the emotions it sprang from, and the emotions it awakens. The Austrian critic Hanslick wrote that music is a language that we can use, that we can understand, but that we are unable to translate.

Remember that Alfred North Whitehead wrote that, among the many fallacies, there is the fallacy of the perfect dictionary - the fallacy of thinking that for every perception of the senses, for every statement, for every abstract idea, one can find an exact counterpart, an exact symbol, in the dictionary.

When I speak of night, I am inevitably - and happily for us, I think - reminded of the last sentence of the first book in Finnegans Wake, wherein Joyce speaks of "the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!" This is an extreme example of an elaborate style. We feel that such a line could have been written only after centuries of literature. We feel that the line is an invention, a poem - a very complex web, as Stevenson would have had it. And yet I suspect there was a moment when the word "night" was quite as impressive, was quite as strange, was quite as awe-striking as this beautiful winding sentence: "rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!"

I think of myself as being essentially a reader. As you are aware, I have ventured into writing; but I think that what I have read is far more important than what I have written. For one reads what one likes - yet one writes not what would like to write, but what one is able to write. 

I had read in Lugones that the metaphor was the essential element of literature, and I accepted that dictum. Lugones wrote that all words were originally metaphors. This is true, but it is also true that in order to understand most words, you have to forget about the fact of their being metaphors. For example, if I say, "Style should be plain", then I don't think that we should remember that "style" (stylus) meant "pen", and that "plain means "flat", because in that case we would never understand it.

Book Review: Russell Muirhead, Nancy Rosenblum - A Lot of People Are Saying

I was predisposed to agree with Muirhead and Rosenblum's main thesis (roughly that "the relatively unmoderated chaos of the internet has allowed Republicans to spew more bullshit faster than ever before, accentuating a general crisis of confidence in institutions") before even reading the book, but reading their argument at length gave me a bit more to chew on. I'm not sure that the "new conspiracism" of the subtitle ("a conspiracy theory without the theory") is really so different than the old-school conspiracy theories they use as a comparison, since both "conspiracy" and "theory" are not so easily defined, and it's often hard to see a real distinction between stupid things people believe now and the stupid things they've always believed. However, I do think there is a good case that something has changed about how controversies are treated in the media, which allows for stupid beliefs to persist and even flourish in a way that they haven't been able to before, and therefore the sheer volume of persistent conspiracy theories that's accumulated has poisoned the well of public discourse. Muirhead and Rosenblum have impeccably logical explanations for how Donald Trump et al's style of habitually repeating malicious lies destabilizes institutions in a negative feedback cycle, and even though "cranky right-wing idiot" is a familiar archetype across both American history and the world stage, the fact that someone of his caliber was able to be elected President says more about our rotten institutions than it does about him. They're predictably less useful on the solutions front, but they're hardly alone in that.

Their thesis is that there is a difference between "classic" conspiracy theories and the "new conspiracism". Classic conspiracy theories identify an event or state of the world, posit an explanation for that event or state, and tie that explanation to a political theory. For example, JFK wasn't randomly killed by Oswald the lone nut, he was deliberately assassinated by the Mafia over RFK's prosecution of organized crime, or by the CIA over the Bay of Pigs fiasco, or by LBJ over his ambition to be President, and the resulting change of administration either directly or indirectly benefited the parties involved (they also have the fantastic example of the Declaration of Independence as a conspiracy theorist document, which is both hilarious and also a little goofy). In contrast, the new conspiracism is just an endless series of unfalsifiable negative assertions, where it's basically irrelevant if any specific claim happens to be true. Pizzagate is a representative example, where prominent Democrats like Hillary Clinton and John Podesta are supposedly running a child sex slavery ring out of the basement of a Washington DC pizza joint as fronts for a global network of Satanic elites, and the most maximally tortured possible reading of Podesta's hacked emails are used to find coded messages that confirm a worldwide human trafficking network and all these other nefarious deeds. If any particular detail doesn't seem to hold up to scrutiny, there's always another "but what about THIS?!" accusation that, unless exhaustively disproven, serves as yet more proof that Hillary Clinton and company are Sandusky crossed with Dahmer raised to the power of the Rothschilds.

So their main distinction between the new conspiracism and the old is that conspiracy theories are now unkillable, and in fact oddly nihilistic, since their proponents don't actually expect anyone to do much about these supposed crimes (e.g. QAnon adherents have to invent ever more elaborate explanations for why all these people are not in jail if they're so obviously guilty, whereas independence was the "solution" for the American revolutionaries). Instead of being able to say "actually, John Podesta's risotto recipe is just a risotto recipe, therefore it's not evidence of a sex dungeon in a pizza restaurant, therefore Hillary Clinton is probably not running a pedophile ring" in the same way as you used to be able to say "actually, the single bullet explanation is consistent with how JFK and Connally were seated relative to each other, therefore it's not evidence of multiple gunmen, therefore there probably weren't any shooters other than Oswald", the hapless normal person attempting to respond to this stuff will always be confronted by new accusations of vile perfidy with proof perpetually just over the horizon, an endlessly wearying vista of fever dreams to beat back. The rise of the internet has propelled this new conspiracism from the fringes to the center of our discourse, allowing unscrupulous figures like Donald Trump to rise to power on a tidal wave of bullshit, since we're all drowning in information and our pudding-like brains will just accept whatever confirms our prior beliefs, and even if in theory the left and the right should be equally susceptible to nonsense, right-wing new conspiracism is aimed directly at institutions themselves, which furthers even more the sense of a world adrift without any adults in charge.

Stated in that way their distinction sounds reasonable, but I'm skeptical if there's a true difference, or if the internet has just presented us with far more information to have to analyze while simultaneously destroying our attention spans and critical thinking skills. It's hard to say that new conspiracy theories like Birtherism or the products of the Arkansas Project are different and more unkillable than JFK conspiracy theories when the JFK conspiracy theory industry is still alive and kicking after over 50 years (the conspiracy merch vendors outside the Sixth Floor Museum all stand by their products). To their detriment, Muirhead and Rosenblum never try to actually define what the "unit" of a conspiracy theory is, so we can't really say if conspiracy theories have gotten more elaborate or implausible or unfalsifiable over time. Matt Taibbi once had a great article called "The Hopeless Stupidity of 9/11 Conspiracies" mocking the bizarre mental contortions required to even begin to make sense of the supposed 9/11 plot (which M & R oddly classify as an old-school conspiracy theory), but it's obviously never been the case that most people actually write down every step of the whole chain of logic in their pet theory from the very beginning, they'll just take it for granted that someone else has already done the legwork and build on that foundation. These days adherents share increasingly inscrutable conspiracy memes with each other on Facebook, but I'm sure the John Birch Society's tracts and pamphlets were not much different. I grew up watching The X-Files, an incredibly prescient show which they somehow don't cite even once, and watching it gave me appreciation for how fun it is to spin lurid tales of shadowy conspiracies, as well as how little sense most conspiracies make once you start looking at them critically, but even then, an overarching conspiracy that's incoherent as a whole can look very plausible on the day by day or episode by episode level.

All of this is in novels like Foucault's Pendulum, but another example of that's near and dear to my heart is Alex Jones. Back when I was in high school, he had yet to make his unfortunate transformation from Austin's "lovable local nutcase" into a nationally infamous deranged hoax promoter, and I would sometimes listen to his radio show for kicks on my drive home from school. Alex Jones would think nothing of having a rant about how global warming was obviously fake and a UN plot to steal our freedoms and make America a fascist socialist police state segue smoothly into a rant about how global warming was actually all too real and would be exploited by crony capitalist elites like Bill Gates and the Bilderbergs to get third world countries hooked on GMO foods and surveillance technology. To a rational outsider, the coexistence of plainly incompatible conspiracy theories like that should give you pause - perhaps either hypothesis might be true, but both can't be true at the same time, and if someone persists in this simultaneous contradiction for too long, the safe bet is to discount their whole belief system entirely. And yet for many people, the opposite happens, and each individual pseudo-fact becomes just another data point that they can plug into their own private X-Files, drawing their personalized conspiracist constellations atop the infinite sky of suspicious stars.

After all, all conspiracy theories exist on a continuum of plausibility, and, unfortunately sometimes conspiracies are actually real. Pizzagate isn't real, but what about Jeffrey Epstein? Oswald may have been a lone gunman, but isn't it true that he had an enormous number of truly odd and questionable connections to important figures of the day, and hasn't the US supported exactly these kinds of shadow coups abroad? The whole world is a Pynchon novel that we're all trapped in, and when you start linking individual theories together there's no end to the mischief you can cause. A semi-normal person who started out believing in "plausible" conspiracy theories like the Clinton Foundation stuff and was predisposed to right-wing tribalism could easily be gradually led into the swamps of Pizzagate and QAnon, never to return, no matter how vigorously the original entry point was debunked, because once they cross the Rubicon everything they read just feeds into the unshakeable conviction that "Hillary Clinton is part of an evil cabal". A diagram of the supposed "Clinton body count" victims might look crazy to an outsider in the same way that the central conspiracy of The X-Files doesn't make much sense if you try to write the whole mythology out on paper, and yet at the same time the idea that Hillary Clinton has had dozens of people directly murdered is an effectively impossibly daunting mountain to scale for the brave soul who's trying to deprogram their Fox News-poisoned relative, especially when they won't trust any outside sources of information.

The problem of "epistemic closure" is another depressing facet of this phenomenon, perhaps the main one. Julian Sanchez first applied the philosophical term to politics in a 2010 blog post titled "Epistemic Closure, Technology, and the End of Distance" which has held up extremely well, even down to his specific example of how conservatives tuned out reality when the rest of the country objected to their being pointlessly cruel to a teenager (liberals are of course not immune to this tendency either, but it's obviously nowhere near to the same degree). There's a few books out there - Anna Merlan's Republic of Lies, Martin Gurri's Revolt of the Public - which delve more deeply into the logic of the collapse in public trust in media figures, but it's hard to see a good way out of this based solely on mass media literacy. Centralized big media companies have well-known flaws, but the solution to ossified corrupt hierarchies probably shouldn't be random people with blogs, except that it probably also shouldn't be unaccountable algorithms deciding what's trustworthy and what's not. The ceaseless, self-reinforcing rage storm that gets called "populism" is incompatible with a pluralist society, yet populist leaders (invariably grifters who feed on the stupidity of their supporters, as in Trump) just start to delegitimize any sources of disproof, since as the saying goes "you can't reason someone out of something they didn't reason themselves into".

Muirhead and Rosenblum effectively have no solution to our political structure circling the drain, beyond general calls to stand up for democracy and institutions, but I didn't really expect them to solve the result of decades of of determined efforts to build a right-wing alternate reality machine in a <200 page book. Last year Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen, and Kevin Arceneaux won an award for their paper "A 'Need for Chaos' and the Sharing of Hostile Political Rumors in Advanced Democracies", which bears directly on this problem. Their conclusion was that a big motivator for people who just really love stupid conspiracy theories was economic stagnation, which gets translated into a general "some men just want to watch the world burn" mentality. So theoretically a better economy coupled with electoral reform coupled with enforcement penalties for bad actors à la House Democrats' proposals in HR1 will somewhat reduce this poisonous conspiracism, except that ironically conspiracists also love voting for right-wing con artists who won't do anything at all to aid the economy and will in fact just entrench themselves further to use the levers of power to steal from the public commons. I think the best solution is to support liberal/progressive/left-wing political candidates who will break the stranglehold of the elites, but that's a lot easier said, even if a lot of people are saying it too, than done.

Book Review: Jia Tolentino - Trick Mirror

The rise of Online as its own distinct space for writing, thinking, and living has presented as many challenges for writers as opportunities, in purely literary terms. It's often difficult for a lot of writers to use the weird, performative, enchanting-but-dispiriting nature of the internet as a platform for self-discovery without shading into navel-gazing. Is posting an inherently interesting act, or, equally plausibly, is it just a big waste of time that has an even lower probability of being interesting to hear about than someone's dreams? Tolentino neatly threads the dangerous needle of using the internet directly as a subject, managing to be in it but not of it, and never coming across as too self-absorbed even when she's trying to place her own life in the context of a world which often doesn't make any sense at all. She has a lot more to talk about than just the internet's effect on discourse and self-image, but whether she's discussing reality TV, Millennial-vintage scams, drugs and religion, or the many questions posed to contemporary feminism, she exactly captures that sense of coming up with a bunch of neat epiphanies and relating them to other people, with the resultant burst of pleasure when your thoughts finally strike a chord with someone else.

For me these essays seemed to group themselves into 2 loose clusters. One focuses on her personal life story. "The I in Internet" is a thoughtful analysis of why exactly the internet, which theoretically could be a nonstop delight to use, instead so frequently feels awful to use, particularly for writers like her who both hate and yet depend on it (as she says, "first, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our understanding of solidarity; and, finally, how it destroys our sense of scale."). "Reality TV Me" is both a rumination on her experience on one of those amazing trashy early-2000s reality TV shows, in hindsight one of our most enduring cultural innovations, and also a discussion of how your own view of yourself can be warped by exposure to the lure of celebrity. "Ecstacy" is about growing up in the hothouse environment of Houston evangelical Protestantism, surrounded by sex, drugs, and chopped and screwed hip hop, and what that's done to her own personal sense of enlightenment and creativity. "The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams" uses the peculiarly Millennial scam of FyreFest, which she appeared in a documentary on, as a particularly emblematic example of how young people's lives have been warped by an entire culture of scams: predatory banks in the financial crisis, onerous student debt for useless degrees, duplicitous social media and its emphasis on obsessive self-presentation, "girlboss" corporate feminism, openly fraudulent companies like Juicero or Theranos, "disruption" and the gig economy's creation of a new precariat, and of course Donald Trump, who if history is in any way just will eventually be as eponymous for scamming as Elbridge Gerry is for unfair redistricting.

The other essay constellation focuses on various facets of feminism in the modern era. "Always Be Optimizing" is about how capitalism intersects with the beauty arms race, as in the phenomenon of expensive, regimented fitness programs like barre, and the always-tricky politics of sex-positivity; I was frequently reminded of Virginia Postrel's excellent book Glamour. "Pure Heroines" explores the struggles of identifying with female characters in literature, with a particular focus on children's literature (I think one of the first things I ever read from her was her wonderful review of Gordon Korman's oeuvre in Jezebel; she has a real gift for putting into words exactly what makes certain books stick in your mind through the years). "The Cult of the Difficult Woman" tackles the profound ambivalence many women (and men too) feel about criticizing terrible women in a culture where misogyny is still potent; I was reminded of Molly Ivins' spectacular takedown of Camille Paglia in her piece "I Am the Cosmos". "I Thee Dread" involves her own complicated feelings about not being married to her long-term boyfriend, but her melange of sentiments will be very familiar to anyone who's been in a perfectly happy long-term relationship and had to field "so, when's the big day questions?", which of course are typically directed to women. The final essay, "We Come from Old Virginia", puts Sabrina Erdely's fraudulent Rolling Stone campus rape story at UVa, her alma mater, in the context of a culture of sexual assault which is all too real, and how it's possible for scumbags like Brett Kavanaugh to sail through life without any consequences at all while at the same time countless women face nothing but bad options for dealing with their own experiences in a society which treats each false accusation as the equal of countless accusations which never got made.

In the Introduction she mentions a throwaway line she once wrote that what women often seem to want from feminist websites is a "trick mirror that carries the illusion of flawlessness as well as the self-flagellating option of constantly finding fault." No one's perfect, but not an inch of the extra space she uses in these essays goes to waste.

Book Review: David Forbes - The Old Iron Dream

I first encountered Forbes as a guest on Radio War Nerd episode #64, discussing the recurring strains of right-wing thought inherent to science fiction dating back to the Golden Age. That sci-fi isn't immune from fascism should be obvious, but it's surprisingly underappreciated, especially if, like me, you don't follow the contemporary science fiction scene very closely. Despite the genre's often-promoted public image as an inclusive outpost of forward thinking, many of its most famous practitioners have used it to advocate for hard-right viewpoints that wouldn't be out of place in the 1930s (or now, come to think of it). This short work is an extension of Forbes' argument in that episode which adds a bit more historical context, particularly around major figures like Robert Heinlein and John Campbell, explaining how a theoretically progressive genre can so comfortably accommodate extremely reactionary views. Science fiction is less a vessel for delivering a specific point of view than a vocabulary for expressing any point of view you could think of, so while it's unfortunate that an aspirationally utopian genre is still saddled with all the anxieties, resentments, and hangups of the present day, it's worth exploring what right-wing science fiction says about right-wingers, as well as the rest of us.

I grew up reading Golden Age authors like Clarke, Heinlein, and especially Asimov, but as a politically naive child I wasn't really aware enough pick up on most political subtext other than as a "neutral" grounding for the immediate story being told. Truth be told, I'm still not always aware of what's lurking behind the pages - I just read John Betancourt's publication of the extended edition of John Campbell's "Who Goes There?" earlier this year without thinking much about Campbell as a person other than "man, what a great suspense writer". I also don't follow contemporary debates over the politics of science fiction very closely, like the Sad Puppies vs N. K. Jemisin controversy that Forbes opens the book with (it's the tiresomely familiar outrage from conservatives that women and minorities expect their viewpoints to be treated fairly). Forbes explains that there's nothing really new about these debates, and that this is just the latest iteration of a very old battle with people who want to express in science fiction the worldview that Corey Robin so aptly chronicled in his book The Reactionary Mind:

From its beginnings, science fiction has harbored a powerful far-right constituency, not as a fringe element, not as a cultural offshoot, but as some of its most revered figures, who have incorporated right-wing ideas and assumptions into some of its classic works. Advocates for everything from eugenics to poll taxes to militaristic authoritarianism have found a home in science fiction, where such ideas have enjoyed a far longer political life than they have in the country's mainstream (not lacking in bigotry itself). Nor has this faction limited its espousal of these beliefs to fiction; many have engaged in political activism over the decades, playing a surprisingly influential role in the larger culture.... Its dream, increasingly archaic and made of brittle iron, is of a world where the social hierarchies of the past are preserved and extended out into the stars, forever.

To be overly simplistic, you might say that this debate is Star Trek versus Starship Troopers. The former posits that, in the absence of economic scarcity, humanity will no longer need many of the zero-sum, us-vs-them, competitive instincts that have played such a huge role in human cultural evolution; the latter posits that this is an illusion, and human societies will always need the whole complex of warlike hierarchical authoritarianism no matter how far in the future you extend our species' lifespan. Is it a mistake to think that we can ever leave our conditioned hatred of the outgroup behind, or is the real mistake in thinking that that hatred was ever truly necessary to begin with? Anyone who's seen Paul Verhoeven's brilliant film adaptation of Starship Troopers knows how easy it is to satirize, but the vast reach of Heinlein's novel should give a non-fascist reader pause. It's one thing to find Heinlein's reduction of humanity's potential down to the level of brute animals (competing strains of bacteria, really) depressing and wonder what would even be the point of recapitulating the endless genocides in our history on alien worlds; it's another to ponder where exactly the line between objectionable and non-objectionable content should be drawn. There's an important line in Starship Troopers that "All correct moral rules derive from the instinct to survive; moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level, as in a father who dies to save his children." How should a liberal respond to that?

Heinlein the person is also a perfect case study for this investigation, since he was ideologically eclectic even in his mature phase: Starship Troopers might be an endorsement of the logic of fascism, but it's hard to argue that The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress or Stranger In a Strange Land, among many of his other novels, share its politics at all, even at the most abstract level. I would have liked to see more about Heinlein's political evolution, since, as Forbes says, "In his early stories, he doesn't come across as the most obvious candidate for a far-right writer. He was fascinated by New Deal social engineering and the Social Credit movement, and helped organize Upton Sinclair's EPIC campaign for a more left-wing government in California." But Forbes discusses "Coventry", one of his earlier short stories I haven't read, that's essentially a refutation of libertarianism, and makes an intriguing comparison:

It's interesting then, to note a similarity between 'Coventry' and Starship Troopers, tales that at first seem very different. Even though the society in Starship Troopers was founded in a coup d'état and does not allow citizens to vote, it is otherwise pretty similar to the sane state of Coventry: 'Many complain but none rebel; personal freedom for all is greatest in history, laws are few, taxes are low, living standards are as high as productivity permits, crime is at its lowest ebb.' But now, rather than societal progress occurring by democratic means, only veterans, who have 'demonstrated that [they place] the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage,' get a role in decision-making.

It's that part about group welfare that got me thinking. Fascism is of course a famously complicated cluster of concepts, like Umberto Eco pointed out 25 years ago, and it's not possible, especially in a book review, to define once and for all a bright line between "good" sacrifice for the collective and "bad". But it's uncomfortable to look at Forbes' description of Heinlein as a New Deal enthusiast and then criticize Starship Troopers, because most other contemporary New Deal enthusiasts probably would not have found much to object to about it, and in fact in many ways Starship Troopers is actually more progressive than the world around it (especially the movie, with its seamless racial and gender equality). Even today many 21st century liberals have an idealized vision of the Roosevelt administration, and I at least have a tough time accommodating the nobler parts of the New Deal with its extensive reliance on Starship Troopers-style rhetoric and even worse policy (Japanese internment is one example, but see also Ira Katznelson's excellent Fear Itself for a fuller treatment of how Southern racism shaped the foundations of the New Deal). Ideologies are often at their most interesting and revealing when they're in flux, so perhaps there isn't much point in demanding consistency between ideologies over the centuries, but Heinlein is only one of many liberals/progressives/leftists who veered right later in life, so it's worth wondering what the trigger points were for him and others.

Because, as Forbes shows, some of Heinlein's fellow right-wingers like Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle had the trigger points of the Great Society. I read The Mote In God's Eye and The Gripping Hand, and younger me thought it was merely "an interesting thought experiment" about humanity dealing with an alien race which went through explosive demographic cycles. Then I read about their politics, and it's depressing to read these talented writers arguing obliquely in novels like Lucifer's Hammer that liberals trying to give black people the vote will demographically destroy American civilization. If we think of conservatism as responding to liberalism rather than the other way around, then it's easier to fit anti-New Deal right-wingers and anti-Great Society right-wingers into the same reactionary continuum, but for me the anti-communism of the 40s is less troubling than the anti-civil rights movement of the 60s. Forbes has a very revealing quote from Norman Spinrad, author of the excellent anti-fascist satire The Iron Dream, who "considers Pournelle a friend despite their drastically different politics. 'Jerry's a complicated guy,' he says, with a chuckle. 'He once described himself as a 14th-century liberal.'" Whatever that means, while it might be comforting to recognize in Pournelle's statement the implicit admission that he's knowingly backward, it doesn't make his ideology less objectionable.

I wish that Forbes had spent more time discussing how or if the non-fascist contemporaries of these authors responded to reactionary ideas in their own works. To name only two, Isaac Asimov's Foundation series and Frank Herbert's Dune series were able to handle feudalism, theocracies, militarism, progress, freedom, demographics, social change, and so on without ever delivering even an implicit hint of conservatism (the first 3 books of Dune are essentially a total rejection of the masturbatory teenage power trip fantasy that Spinrad's anti-fascism essay "The Emperor of Everything" describes as critical to the young proto-reactionary's embrace of right-wing ideas). What was their approach, and is there anything that modern authors can learn from it when they face what Jemisin did? Is it a good strategy to just read, say, the better of Orson Scott Card's novels and then ignore everything else about him? Since Asimov etc were just as unable to finally exorcise the fascist ghosts of science fiction as authors in every other genre at the time were, it's probably wrong to think that the problem lies with the genre itself instead of with what ideologies people find attractive, but it's good to be reminded all the same that modern authors seem to be fighting back, and perhaps that at least some of the individualist, progressive, emancipatory elements of Star Trek could come to pass, bit by bit.