I just finished Expanse since the last book was just printed in Poland. Not bad series, though socialist perspective gives it very different meaning. It is a reality desperately needing socialism, and it's like all notions of socialism was removed from human history and memory and blocked for the future. So everything people can think of is various degrees of fascism. Even Belters, people who by all means should be socialist by the very nature of their conditions, constantly speak about co-dependency and instead we mostly see social darwinism and at best extreme tribalism.
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2022
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it’s like all notions of socialism was removed from human history and memory and blocked for the future
That seems to be often the case with western sci-fi. Ivan Efremov, famous Soviet paleontologist and writers, actually said this tendency of western writers to just blatantly extrapolate capitalism to other planets was one of the main inspirations for his Great Circle cycle of books. There he envisioned a socialist space future, with many different species united. IIRC he straight up postulates in one of the books that socialism is one of the requirements for a species to advance into interstellar era of their existence.
Yeah. Western sci-fi always defaults to social darwinism and it's not accidental, sci fi writers do think about future development but they can't even imagine anything better than capitalism* so overwhelming most of their future visions are just socialdarwinist dystopias because that is what capitalism defaults to. Even some of them noticed like Cole and Bunch wrote in the afterword to the "Sten" cycle**, that sci-fi writers are incredibly fond of fascism. Finally, that is influence of a system. Like polish and soviet sci fi writers still did it fairly often, but immediately started to produce solely disturbing dystopian dark books after socialism was destroyed. Though probably not only because chinese writers do it too, their fantasy novels are pure socialdarwinist (though the setting have legit reason for it) and the famous in the west Liu Cixin series went from ingenius first book through decent second to third being absolutely fucking shitscape catalog of apocalypse.
*There are also previous systems represented, but since feudalism make it hard to develop space tech those are usually marginal or neobarbaric (like Warhammer 40000) or visited by "enlightened" capitalist ~~conquistadors~~ well meaning visitors. There is also absolutely astounding amount of monarchism, looking mostly at D. Weber, but he's far from the only one, just main culprit.
**That series was actually good. It also completely negates socialism, but shits on typical lib monarchist sentiment HARD. The Eternal Emperor from that series is actually the ideal monarch as described by western monarchists, made real by advanced technology, but everything still goes to hell.
It is interesting how modern fiction usually defaults to dystopian imperialism, you could argue that a shitty situation is more interesting to read about, Mortal Engine books are a good read about social Darwinism (literally mentioned within) and how the moving cities require constant slaves and resources to survive on a barren Earth.
I mean this is first rule of drama. There is no drama without the conflict, and drama is the point of fiction books - not even children books are usually devoid of it. They go way too far though, since 90's there is alsmot impossible to find any futurist piece that would not be dystopian to large degree. Fantasy hav similar problem, and i'm not even speaking about epicly cynical dark fantasy like Glen Cook, but about the shit, dirt and evil settings.