Iain Banks, Author of the Culture Novels, Dead at 59
9th June 2013
Read it.
Iain Banks was a big noise among speculative fiction writerdom not only because he was a good writer (which he was) but also because he envisioned a universe in which socialism has triumphed through technology and therefore actually works, a setup that he called The Culture, the sort of world that Lenin et al. thought they would get by force-industrializing the Soviet Union (with results as you see them).
A significant number of ‘writers’ are drones who would really prefer that someone else support them while they Devote Their Time To Art, and so are by inclination socialist (except when they hit it big, in which case what’s theirs is theirs and keep your hands off. Stephen King comes immediately to mind.)
Because speculative fiction attracts a large number of bright but impractical people, it has a larger percentage of socialists than most genres — as one can tell by listening to many of them blather about political issues (which, in the modern world, can include where the coffee in your cup came from). Think English majors who really wanted to be engineers but discovered that it required a lot of math. (‘Math is hard!’)
And that’s not when they’re avowed Marxists, like Steven Brust. But most of them are conventional ‘progressives’, like Isaac Asimov.
Of course, there are a significant minority who actually apply their intelligence to understanding the real world and hence are on the conservative-to-libertarian side of the aisle. Publishers tend to attract people of a compatible bent: lefties gravitate to Tor, and righties to Baen. If you want to know what a writer’s politics are, see by whom s/he is published.
But don’t take my word for it; here’s Charlie Stross, another excellent writer and socialist:
However, I’d like to pause for a moment and reflect on my personal sense of loss. Iain’s more conventional literary works were generally delightful, edgy and fully engaged with the world in which he set them: his palpable outrage at inequity and iniquity shone through the page. And in his science fiction he achieved something, I think, that the genre rarely manages to do: he was intensely political, and infused his science fiction with a conviction that a future was possible in which people could live better — he brought to the task an an angry, compassionate, humane voice that single-handedly drowned out the privileged nerd chorus of the technocrat/libertarian fringe and in doing so managed to write a far-future space operatic universe that same human beings would actually want to live in (if only it existed).
‘Palpable outrage at inequity and iniquity’ is usually the spoor of the ‘progressives’, ‘if only it existed’ is their epitaph.