Libertarian Science Fiction

AUDIO PODCAST | Jeff Riggenbach on Libertarian Science Fiction — Prometheus Unbound: In a new addition to the Mises Institute’s online media library today, part of The Libertarian Tradition series, Jeff Riggenbach discusses libertarian science fiction in a 22:23 minute audio podcast.

Riggenbach discusses the role of science fiction in keeping individualism alive, the phenomenon of all the best known libertarian novels being science fiction novels, Eric S. Raymond’s “A Political History of SF” in which Raymond argues that science fiction has a natural affinity with libertarianism, and the importance of dramatizing our values (pdf).

Reviewed in some detail are A.E. van Vogt’s novel The Weapon Shops of Isher and Eric Frank Russell’s novel The Great Explosion.

Some Further Notes on Libertarian Science Fiction: [Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode "Libertarian Science Fiction II"]

This essay is about four writers, none of whom was a libertarian, but each of whom wrote something back in the 1960s that made a significant contribution to the libertarian tradition.

The first of the four was a science-fiction writer, though only occasionally. He was born 94 years ago last week, on February 25, 1917, in suburban Manchester, England. His name at birth was John Burgess Wilson. His family was Roman Catholic, which at that time virtually guaranteed that he would be confirmed in the Church at the age of about seven. He had, therefore, already come to be known as "Jack Wilson" when, in the mid 1920s, he was, as he puts it in his autobiography, "confirmed in the name of [Saint] Anthony." This made him John Anthony Burgess Wilson from the time of his confirmation onward and gave him the pen name under which he would eventually become famous.

Anthony Burgess, or just Burgess, as I shall call him from now on, was the son of a musician, Joseph Burgess, who drifted from playing piano in movie theatres as accompaniment for silent films to playing piano in pubs to owning and running his own pub. Joseph wound up a tobacconist. His son shared his love of music and wanted to study music at the University of Manchester, but he was not accepted to the program because of his mediocre secondary-school grades in physics. So he majored in English instead. After graduating in 1940, he spent six years in the army during and just after World War II, then put in six more years as a literature instructor at various English secondary schools.

By now it was 1954, Burgess was 37 years old, and he wasn't earning enough money teaching school. He had decided to try his hand at a couple of novels. But when one of the publishers to whom he had submitted one of these novels wrote to him, requesting that he come to their London offices to discuss his manuscript, he found he was too broke to travel the 75 miles he would have had to travel to keep such an appointment. As he put it in his autobiography, "I was in debt to the grocer and overdrawn at the bank. I could not afford a return train ticket from Banbury to London." In the end, he did find a way to make the trip, but his novel was rejected, anyway, not only by the publisher that had asked for the meeting, but by every publisher that looked at it. The other novel fared no better.