What Would Conservative Sci-Fi Look Like?

The Answer May Surprise You; Or Maybe Not.

Over Labor Day weekend, while lounging about enjoying one of the last weekends of summer, I came across a poster on Threads who said with all earnestness, “Most Sci-Fi is liberal oriented; what would a conservative Sci-Fi even look like?” At first I was like, “that can’t be true,” but the more I dwelt on it, the more I realized the poster was genuinely onto something. It got me thinking (and even kind of ruined my Labor Day thank you!)

As she noted, most science fiction has a liberal bias factored in. There are narrative reasons why liberalism and science fiction go hand in hand:

• Authors in general tend to be more liberal and advocate more liberal viewpoints. But that’s kind of giving it short shrift. The fact is the better ones look at things from much broader perspectives and articulate these ideas for a wider audience. Authors use sci fi as a way to explore provocative social and political ideas and to speculate how progress in science and engineering might shape the future of politics, race, religion, and sex and other social themes. Conservatives don’t tend to do this well, instead fixating on the more status quo elements that work and regurgitating much of the exact same content in different ways.

• Diversity. Engaging with and interacting with aliens is often a subtext or metaphor for human diversity. Gene Roddenberry made this a major factor in the creation of the Star Trek series. The famous Star Wars Cantina scene is a treasure trove of this, and demonstrative of how it works well (except for the droids, who were thrown out).

• Innovation/Creativity. Much science-fiction delves into a new way of thinking about a topic, innovative new technologies and outside the box thinking. Take Jurassic Park; at the time of its release, focus on DNA engineering was considered innovative and exciting and most readings of it were optimistic on its use. Michael Crichton and Steven Speilberg turned that on its head using modern ideas of capitalism run amok and demonstrated the negative aspects of such technology, in a brilliant and exciting way. A conservative reading of it is more akin to Jurassic World (Jurassic Park made a billion dollars—let’s make five more of them!—That’s about as conservative a thought as there is) before things go south, and let’s face it, it just isn’t as good a movie.

• Futuristic thinking. Most futuristic aspects tend to be more on the utopian side of things. Very positive, human nature’s darker impulses minimized some. Even in dystopian stories, it’s usually presented as the world being bad, while the hero we empathize with being the person who shares a more liberal perspective fighting against all odds vrs the oppressive nature of the world.

• Heroes and Villains. The heroes in a lot of science fiction are the lone person up against some science based hazard or a system that threatens to upend “our way of life.” The villains are almost always an oppressive system, alien (xenophobia!), business or military entity seeking to crush out originality or non-conformity.

Granted, that’s not all Science Fiction. Just the generic plotlines associated with them. Most science fiction are standard storylines and tropes that just use science related themes to demonstrate the issue. Worried about corporate lack of responsibility? Robocop or the Aliens movies will work for you. A film about class structure? District 9 or Elysium fit the bill. You in favor of a green new deal and something demonstrating the attributes of saving the environment? Avatar and its sequel are two of the largest selling films of all time.

But that’s not to say that Science Fiction CAN’T be conservative or have conservative perspectives. A famous example was “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” which was a thinly veiled metaphor for Communism during the 1950s. Of course, the heroes and people we identify with are trying to avoid it, but in the end eventually lose unable to fight against it. With McCarthyism rampant in Hollywood in the 1950s, this is what they churned out, trying to make you fearful of even letting it get a foothold.

Someone on that Threads post pointed to the Walking Dead as a right wing fever dream. The main character is a cop, sometimes referred to as “The Rick-tator” for his forceful leadership. Guns everywhere. Inclusivity usually leads to bad results, better to be skeptical, even xenophobic. The worst elements usually winning while the more liberal ones easy fodder. I’d argue that’s one side of it. The Walking Dead is actually a really good show (at least it was, it fell off quite a bit in the later seasons), but it was actually about finding a balance between the harsh nihilistic realities of the world (personified by Rick’s best friend Shane in the first season) and the better angels of our nature, finding a place for everyone (personified by Herschel in the early seasons). There was always some give and take, new fellow travelers growing the group, even more villainous enemies at odds with it.

Like Walking Dead, most apocalyptic dystopian future shows all have those themes. Mad Max for instance. There are a group of good people, a group of bad people, and we always see it from Max’s point of view somewhere in the middle. In Road Warrior, the good guys were a holdout band running an oil derrick fending off the slime of humanity. In that sense, the community of people demonstrated liberal values, helping one another for security. The dregs were the epitome of anarchism. Where was Max? He belonged with the dregs but made a deal with the community to help them. In Beyond Thunderdome, the villains are Tina Turner and the people of Bartertown, it’s very name emblematic of conservative free market values. In Fury Road, he is saving a group of women from the four horsemen of the apocalypse, Immortan Joe (pestilence), and his cabal like comarades from the Bullet Farm (war) and gas town (fire), with Max being Death hovering around at all points.

However, more often conservative themes tend to be more situational rather than the broad overarching themes. Often they aren’t even conservative, just more leaning that way compared to a too far leftist villain. Let’s take a quick look at two Star Trek movies to demonstrate:

• Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the Klingon planet of Praxis explodes and Klingons reach out to the Federation for peace and help (a metaphor for the collapse of the Soviet Union at the time). Our Hero, Capt. Kirk, and some other Federation members we identify with are resistent, resulting in a Federation conspiracy against the Peace Conference (unbeknownst to Kirk)— their hatred for the Klingons runs too deep. The liberal position would be to accept the peace and welcome with open arms; this does not happen, everyone is too set in their ways wanting to keep the status quo (a conservative theme if ever there was one).

• In Star Trek: First Contact, we have the villainous Borg¹ as an antagonist. The nature of the Borg is to expand their hive, incorporating victims of it into their collective, losing all individual identity and working only for the good of the collective hive. It’s Ayn Rand’s nightmare of untethered liberalism run amok visualized to the nth degree. Of course our heroes, a generally more liberal group of various intellects and alien identities, have to fight against that framework. I would kind of classify this as a liberal group fighting against a VERY-UBER-ULTRA liberal group. Which brings up a point I want to stress—liberal, conservative, etc., these are all relative terms. Something liberal today may not be so 50 years from now. Likewise, a person who styles themself a liberal may in fact be more conservative than many other liberals out there. Picard fighting the Borg is like that.

Of course, there are others too:

• Who was the villain in E.T.? The government. You can hear Reagan cheering at that one. In fact, in many Speilberg films, the villains are often governmental authorities doing nefarious things with power (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Minority Report, etc).

• One of the problems many had with the Star Wars prequels is that the heros we identify with, the Jedi, Princess Amidala, etc., are all on the side of the proto-fascist Emperor. Our heroes, The Jedi (conservative religious fanatics, check) seek to enforce the status quo the whole time, and are so rigid and dogmatic in their religion that there is little variation in practice. In the very first scene, we are made to believe the Trade Federation are villains (they are, misled by the same Emperor) but as events unfold, the audience further sides with the side of the stormtroopers and the slowly unfolding Empire. Our allegiances don’t change until the final third of the last movie of the prequel trilogy, Revenge of the Sith, when Order 66 occurs wiping out the Jedi and making the lines clear for the first time in the series.

• How does Paul Atreides attain an army to face the Harkonnens in Dune? By appealing to a bunch of religious fanatics and warlords.

• In Demolition Man, Sylvester Stallone wakes up after being frozen (the Brave New World references in this movie are constant) and what happens? It seems he’s essentially a conservative fighting against an overbearing liberal utopia. Actually, that’s not right; he’s a liberal fighting against a very liberal status quo that has become unnervingly conservative. Wait, that ain’t it either. Anyway, the answer is to fight Wesley Snipes with a lot of guns and get a rat hamburger with Denis Leary among the locals living as morlocks.

• The whole Predator series takes conservatives’ love of hunting and weaponry and asks itself, “What if you faced an alien who loved hunting and weapons even more than you did?”²

• The hero in Blade Runner is a guy so flat, monotonous and dull for a long time everyone assumed he was a robot. Pretty conservative. His job is to hunt and kill out of date robots, who are the only ones in the movie showing any level of emotion or life, and who demonstrate liberal virtues in the film. The sequel, Blade Runner 2049, gives us the perspective of another robot, now hunting those same out of date robots. He finds out about one potentially giving birth and the immediate reaction of everyone is either 1) let’s wipe out any possible record of this because it will completely upend the status quo which has to be maintained or 2) let’s profit from this, breed an army of robots so we can take over everywhere, and it’ll be cheaper than making them or 3) as a group of out of date robots, we will rise up and defeat the status quo holding us down. He’s at odds with all of these perspectives.

• Mars Attacks! is a take on 1950s alien-horror tropes where the aliens come to Earth and our liberal virtues of peace and inclusivity fail us miserably. The aliens wipe out everyone, often in very hilarious ways, as President Jack Nicholson tries to maintain some semblance of control.

But for me, two movies really stand out a little more than the rest at being more conservative. One is painfully obvious and the other less so. Let’s go obvious first.

Starship Troopers is a film so adamantly conservative it’s ridiculously so. I’d say it’s borderline campy but there is no “borderline” about it. Based on the book by Robert Heinlein (who himself veered into right wing/libertarian tropes in his writing from time to time) the film is essentially a full length propaganda ad for fascism. It’s OK though, since the enemy we have to face are a cadre of intergalactic bugs, that if space-fascism doesn’t win, we’re all doomed. Neil Patrick Harris doing his best Gestapo Doogie Howser impression makes an appearance as one of the head Commandants in charge. Denise Richards puts a pleasant face on it to help with enlistment in the cause. Right wing? Uh, yeah. I think this is what people had in mind when they wrote on Threads “What would a right wing science fiction movie look like?”

The other, believe it or not, is 2001: A Space Odyssey. I don’t say its conservative because of any political position or its exceptionally slow pace. I call it conservative because it demonstrates better than many other movies how small we are compared to nature, and how many of the liberal societal trappings many of us believe in are in the end not as profound as our very small place in the universe. One of the most important concepts of conservative ideology is the idea of the “State of Nature,” that if you strip the societal aspects of culture away and we are left with just humans doing what humans do, how does that play out (kind of like a philosophical Lord of the Flies). This film kind of takes that notion and runs with it without ever losing sight of how it began and extolling humanity’s fatal flaw.

The opening scene with us as apes usually throws people off—WTF is this about? When one ape plays with a bone and demonstrates the first use of tools, we are now “thinking apes” and a step beyond mere animals. What does he do with that tool?—beat to death another ape. It then fast forwards in the greatest time leap in movie history, where we see the extent of all these tools for humanity—mankind among the stars, landing on the moon. In fact, we create a tool, HAL, so complex and intelligent, it demonstrates more emotion and depth of feeling than the crew members aboard the spaceship it’s on, and more accurately outthinks its human counterparts (at chess for instance). Yet despite that, our human nature for individuality, for superiority, leads the crew to believe that HAL is malfunctioning and they try to dismantle it. HAL defends itself, and only when it’s functions have all but ceased does the truth be revealed to our hero, that the humans have not been given all the information and that the error that started this was likely due to their own human predisposition. For the last third of the film, we see humanity’s failings in a new form—on a higher plain of existence, where our imperfections are glaringly so. Some may disagree with this as a conservative take, I may even agree to an extent (I’d love to hear your takes on the idea in the comments). But what makes it one of the greatest films of all time and probably the greatest science fiction film of all time is that whether you take it from a liberal perspecitve or a conservative one, you can appreciate what a wonderful work of art it really is.

PurpleAmerica’s Obscure Fact of the Day

When Kubrick made 2001, people thought he did such a great job of it that to this day there are those that say he was instrumental in faking the moon landing.

PurpleAmerica’s Final Word(s) on the Subject

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Footnotes and Fun Stuff

1. Best line from the movie, when someone first mentions the “Borg” the person responds “sounds Swedish.” A nod to famous swedish tennis player Bjorn Borg.

2. I’ll highly recommend one of the recent forays in this series, “Prey” which asks what would happen if that Predator came to Earth and faced off against Native Americans and early settling fur trappers. It’s really a gem of a movie. Go watch it now.