(urth) Puppies

[Norwood, Frederick Hudson]

You live in a place where conservatism is unfashionable.  I am a liberal who lives in a place where liberalism is unfashionable (Tennessee).  But when it comes to, for example, Wolfe and Pournelle, I think those words are misleading.  Wolfe is a religious conservative, and has a very dim view of government in general.  If Pournelle is religious, he hasn't mentioned it, and he has often worked for the government.  If this discussion is going to make any sense at all, we need to distinguish between social conservatives (anti-gay, anti-abortion, War on Christmas conservatives) and libertarians such as Pournelle, who have allied with the Republican Party in the US but must find themselves in bed with some really strange bedfellows.

More important is the question to what extent politics influences their fiction.  Pournelle's fiction is, of course, all about politics, but I enjoy it anyway.  I enjoy Wolfe less when he puts too much politics into his fiction, as I think he did in The Land Across.  I've read all of Vinge, enjoyed it all, and didn't even know he was right-wing.  I still don’t know what tail of the Right he is on.

But I don't like the idea of people voting for the Hugo based on politics (or gender or race) instead of on how good the story is.  And I have noticed people complaining that they didn't win because of their politics (Spider Robinson is a good example) when really the problem was that the particular story wasn't good enough.

Rick