Politics in SFF: Arguing With Andy Weir

Courtesy of a new Gizmodo article analyzing Andy Weir’s recent appearance on the Critical Drinker podcast, an earlier Weir comment, which the Gizmodo piece quotes, is currently doing the rounds on social media. Taken from a 2018 interview with K.E. Lanning for Futurism, the excerpted quote is a truncated version of Weir’s back-to-back answers to two separate questions about his taste in science fiction. In full, the exchange goes like this:

The science fiction genre is broad—your writing seems to be more on the traditional science fiction end and not as much on the social commentary/speculative end of the spectrum. Can you discuss this?

I dislike social commentary. Like… I really hate it. When I’m reading a book, I just want to be entertained, not preached at by the author. Plus, it ruins the wonder of the story if I know the author has a political or social axe to grind. I no longer speculate about all possible outcomes of the story because I know for a fact that the universe of that book will conspire to ensure that the author’s political agenda is validated. I hate that.

I put no politics or social commentary into my stories at all. Anyone who thinks they see something like that is reading it in on their own. I have no point to make, and I’m not trying to affect the reader’s opinion on anything. My sole job is to entertain, and I stick to that.

To that end, I also don’t talk about my personal political opinions publicly. I don’t want readers to even know, honestly. I don’t want that in the back of their minds as they read my stuff.

I totally respect your personal views, but you had also mentioned Heinlein, Asimov, and Arthur C. Clark as influences. Heinlein in particular delves into social commentary in such books as Stranger in a Strange Land. And there are many classic sci-fi novels in which the author creates dystopian universes to comment on the human condition, such as Brave New World, 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, etc.

Yeah, I didn’t really like the political message aspects of those stories. Not that I disagreed with the political point. Just that I didn’t like the political points being there at all. Now, those writers are so good they make compelling and addictive stories *despite* the political messaging. But that’s often not the case with other stories and other authors.

You’re not mis-reading me, though. I deeply dislike social commentary. For instance, as a lifelong Star Trek fan, it’s always bothered me that there is a presumed “responsibility” within Star Trek shows to talk about social issues. I just want to watch Romulans and the Federation shoot at each other.

I’m not saying anyone else should hold my view. Many readers select books specifically for their social commentary. There’s no “wrong” way to enjoy a book. But in the end, as a writer, I can only do my best to write books that I would enjoy reading. So, for me, that means no politics.

This would be a bizarre statement for any author to make, but especially so for Weir, whose work - quite counter to his assertion here - very much does contain both political and social commentary. The disconnect comes from the fact that Weir doesn’t seem to understand what either term means; or rather, has construed them to apply in far more limited ways than they actually do. It’s a bit like when a certain type of transphobe gets mad about pronouns being taught in English class, either unaware or uncaring that the term describes a specific grammatical function and does not, in fact, apply solely to matters of gender identification.

That being so, just as baffled, angry transphobes can successfully use a variety of pronouns in everyday life without realizing that’s what they’re called, so too can authors like Andy Weir include politics and social commentary in their works without realizing that’s what they’ve done. And just as it’s impossible to write anything remotely complex in English without eventually using pronouns, so too is it impossible to write complex fiction without any reference to politics or social commentary: they’re baseline components of narrative.

From where I sit, Weir’s confusion on this count is threefold: firstly, he appears to think that politics and social commentary must be deliberately intended as such by the author; secondly, that these elements have to accord with the author’s own real-life views; and thirdly, that they must be overtly framed within the story as Politics And Social Commentary. None of which is remotely true; but if you’ve only ever seen the issue framed a particular way (and most often by people complaining about it), then it’s an easy mistake to make.

To start, then: at the most basic level, all stories function as acts of social commentary, in the sense that all fiction derives from, and is thus foundationally informed by, the real world. Saying that a particular piece of fiction lacks political and social dimensions makes as much sense as claiming that you don’t speak with an accent: in both cases, what you’re really saying is that a particular mode of expression is so pleasantly, unthinkingly familiar that you’ve mistaken it for the contextual default. Comfort, however, is not synonymous with neutrality. A perfectly temperate environment might be comfortable to inhabit, such that you aren’t distracted by feeling hot or cold, damp or dry, windblown or itchy or any other sensation, but that’s not the same as an absence of temperature, to say nothing of the fact that there’s no universal yardstick for what constitutes the perfect day. One person’s ideal climate might easily be another’s sensory hell - and while both are entitled to their preferences, it would be insane to argue that only one such forecast counts as weather.

Social commentary, therefore, is inherent to fiction in the same way that politics is inherent to reality. That they might not be overtly at the forefront of a story - or that they might not be perceptible as such to a particular reader - doesn’t mean they aren’t there. And this remains true even (or perhaps especially) in the case of SFF works, whose settings contain elements that the real world does not, but which are nonetheless shaped by human knowledge and imagination - and by their limitations. Golden age sci-fi, for instance, abounds with works by men who, for all their creativity when it came to the technological future, were either unwilling or unable to imagine more varied roles for women than what was prescribed by the sexism of the era. That such stories were not “about” women doesn’t mean that the authors’ chauvinist depictions fail to be reflective of social commentary; rather, it opens up two parallel lines of critical enquiry. On the one hand, we have the world of the story and how it treats gender, both in terms of what is shown and what is absent; and on the other, we have the author’s own biases, whether subconscious or deliberate, and the extent to which they have shaped that fictional world.

Which brings me to the second point: that social commentary within fiction doesn’t have to be reflective of the author’s personal views. To take a classic sci-fi example, Orson Scott Card’s staunch homophobia didn’t prevent him from writing complex gay characters on more than one occasion, nor did his politics make it impossible for readers to perceive homoerotic subtext in certain of his works. While it is certainly common for an author’s beliefs to appear overtly within their fiction, this doesn’t mean there’s an easy, beat-for-beat comparison to be made between one and the other. Particularly in SFF, the guiding creative principle is often some variant on what if, which allows the author scope to explore ideas, perspectives and choices they might not necessarily condone in real life, safe in the knowledge that, whatever they do to their characters, no real human being is harmed. To take an easy example, vanishingly few fantasy authors whose stories are set in fictional empires and kingdoms are monarchists in real life: we’re compelled by the narrative potential of such systems, not their historical efficacy.

At the same time, our personal beliefs as authors inevitably shape what we write, if only in the sense of dictating what we choose to write about. Andy Weir, for instance, writes passionately and knowledgably about real-world science - a thing he’d be vastly less likely to do if his personal views skewed towards anti-vaccine, flat Earth, dinosaur-bones-are-a-hoax-and-the-world-is-only-6000-years-old Creationism. That he might still vote in lockstep with such people for non-science reasons is entirely possible; but while that would doubtless be crushing to many fans were it true, the point is that his personal views and interests are still indelibly present in his fiction. Similarly, it would be incongruous - which is to say, unexpected but not impossible - for someone whose real-life views of women are loudly, reductively misogynistic to produce works which showcase a wide range of complex, nuanced female characters. Whether to a greater or lesser extent, interest and inspiration go hand in hand: it might not always be possible to tell at a glance which elements of a given story support or derive from an author’s politics, but the idea that no such connection exists is laughable.

All this being so, I find Weir’s assertion that “it ruins the wonder of the story if I know the author has a political or social axe to grind” because “the universe of that book will conspire to ensure that the author’s political agenda is validated” more than usually bizzare, as it suggests a belief that, outside of politics, authors have no distinguishing literary characteristics, favourite themes or other such tells that readers might use to intelligently predict the flavour or denouement of their next book. To again use Weir himself as an example, his work is known to be scientifically grounded, imbued with a sense of intellectual collaboration and hope, with a narrative voice that skews comic, conversational and heavy on geek culture references. Knowing this, were I to pick up any random Weir book - and I’ve not yet read any, though I’ve seen the film adaptation of The Martian - I’d have certain expectations about the text. I certainly wouldn’t assume that a nihilistic ending was on the table, or that the characters might realize midway through that science is only a test that God set for humanity, such that prayer is really the answer to whatever dilemma his astronauts face.

For that matter, neither would I expect magic to make a sudden, third-act appearance in a book billed as hard sci-fi rather than space opera or science fantasy, because genre, too, can cue us about a story’s shape. That doesn’t mean no-one is ever pleasantly surprised, of course, or that great books never play with genre expectations - they frequently do. The point, rather, is that an attentive reader can predict a great deal about what might happen in an otherwise unfamiliar story based on any number of factors, up to and including knowledge of the author’s past works, any interviews they might’ve given, the genre itself, and their individual knowledge of particular tropes, to say nothing of any narrative foreshadowing deliberately included in the text. That Weir’s enjoyment of a story diminishes in proportion to the visibility of the author’s politics proves, not that apolitical stories exist, but that Weir himself sees his own default preferences, beliefs and assumptions as politically neutral - which they are not. He’s mistaking a temperate environment for the absence of temperature, and while he’s certainly allowed, as anyone is, to prefer a particular type of story, it’s grossly inaccurate to confuse this inability to perceive a certain type of social commentary with its not being there in the first place.

Which leads me to the final point: that a story doesn’t have to overtly trumpet its political dimensions in order to have them. That Weir has seemingly picked Star Trek as an example of something that doesn’t need politics, when the show from its inception has been foundationally geared around political statements, makes for an interesting case in point. While some Star Trek episodes are less overtly political than others, the structure of the show and its world are all shaped by specific beliefs, both in-world and in terms of the creators’ intentions. The Earth, for instance, is meant to be a post-scarcity society, one in which food, healthcare and education are accessible to all; the Prime Directive might be frequently violated on-screen, but its existence as a philosophical principle nonetheless consistently informs the actions of the characters.

But let’s flip it around a moment. As Weir claims to enjoy the non-political aspects of Star Trek, saying he “just want[s] to watch Romulans and the Federation shoot at each other,” what might that look like in a Star Trek with different politics? Would the various Federation captains be as fun to root for if they were constantly murdering innocents and torturing captives? Would Kirk still be an inspiring a leader if he was constantly groping and leering at underage girls? Would the original series have made such a profound cultural impact without Uhura, Chekov, Rand, Spock and Sulu? What would the story look like, if the Federation was run by human supremacist xenophobes bent on committing genocide against any and all alien races? That Weir was able to enjoy the low-politics episodes as pure escapist fun was entirely predicated on the underlying politics of the show, which situated the protagonists as characters worth caring about, on a mission worth investing in. That the show’s core premise accorded so well with his personal politics as to become politically invisible doesn’t make it neutral: particularly for the period in which the original series aired, it was - and historically remains - politically radical.

Here’s a bias worth thinking about: why are stories about technological change held to be politically neutral in a way that stories about sociological change are not? The two phenomena are wholly interdependent, and yet we tend to view them as separate things, despite the degree to which social change has historically been driven, both wholly and in part, by technological advances. The advent of birth control, for instance, was hugely instrumental in the push for women’s rights, just as the invention of the car steadily changed the way we design our cities, and thus the way that we inhabit them on a day-to-day basis. But of course, as Ursula Le Guin once pointed out, we also suffer from a cultural tendency to view only certain innovations as being truly technological. To quote her 2005 mini-essay A Rant About “Technology:”

We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “technology” at all. As if linen were the same thing as flax — as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers — as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just picked them when they were ripe…

Earlier in the same essay, which she penned in response to a reviewer asserting that “technology is carefully avoided” in her work, Le Guin decries the perceived contrast between ‘hard’ SF, which is “all about technology,” and ‘soft’ SF, like her own writing, which “doesn’t have any technology… because I am only interested in psychology and emotions and squashy stuff like that, right?” She then points out, rightly, that “technology is the active human interface with the material world,” but that “the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources.” With this in mind, it’s worth reflecting on the degree to which technology has always been an implicitly gendered concept. Without fiber arts - weaving, sewing, knitting - human beings would still be naked; and yet, when we think about technology through history, we’re far more likely to consider traditionally masculine fields like weaponry and architecture to be technological in nature. Weaving, by contrast, is merely women’s work.

Technology, like fiction, both derives from and then subsequently informs the society that created it. To view technology in isolation, then - to act as though its development and deployment has no sociological or political dimensions - is to engage in a highly political fiction: that of technological neutrality. The entire separation of SF into ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ thus becomes doubly loaded, particularly in contexts where ‘hard’ is viewed as pure and ‘soft’ as adulterated. Consider, then, what would happen if we flipped this around and said: ‘hard’ science fiction - intellectual, thematically grounded, deep - is only that which acknowledges the realistic social impact of technology, and which further defines technology, not exclusively as spaceships and gadgets and weapons, but as Le Guin’s “active human interface with the material world.” ‘Soft’ science fiction - populist, simple, shallow - would then become the opposite: that which acknowledges neither the full breadth of technology nor its impact, but is rather more superficially concerned with aesthetics and excitement, unmoored from any more complex considerations.

This would be, unquestionably, a political choice of framing - but so too are the terms as they exist now. The only difference is that the original usage is so firmly established as to be politically invisible to many, while the other draws their ire for daring to put the boot on the other foot. In either case, the point is this: Andy Weir may think he’s writing stories without politics, but that simply isn’t true. Everything from his choice of what to write, how and why it’s written, the closed world of the story itself and our view of that world as readers contains political dimensions; it’s only that he’s so used to his preferences being treated as neutral defaults that he fails to see it. And that, I think, is well worth pointing out - even if the critique is eight years late.