Big tech billionaires are trying to make dystopian science fiction into reality

Episode Summary 

Each day’s news events seem to reinforce the cliché that truth is stranger than fiction, but the strangest thing of all is how so much of our current politics is quite literally based on fiction.

That isn’t an exaggeration. The right-wing oligarch Peter Thiel has named his military surveillance company Palantir after the crystal balls featured in The Lord of the Rings, he’s also repeatedly told people to look to mid-20th century science fiction for business ideas—never mind that many of those stories were dystopias. Likewise, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk named his AI chatbot Grok after a term used in a novel by the authoritarian capitalist Robert Heinlein.

Other Republican figures like fascist writer Curtis Yarvin, Vice President JD Vance, and activist Steve Bannon routinely reference The Lord of the Rings or even more explicitly reactionary novels like The Camp of the Saints.

Why is it that so many of today’s far-right figures seem to get their political ideas from fiction? There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of the biggest is that some of the most influential novelists like Heinlein or editors like John W. Campbell wanted their readers to do just that. And who can forget Ayn Rand’s interminable political monologues?

There is a lot to talk about here, and joining me to discuss is Jeet Heer, he’s a columnist at The Nation where he writes about politics and social issues, but he also tackles culture as well, including in his podcast, The Time of Monsters. One of the focal points of this episode is his 2014 book review of a Heinlein biography.

The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

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* Mediocrity just might be the organizing principle of minds, biological and synthetic

* What is ‘neo-reactionism’ and why is it so powerful within Trump 2.0?

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* The very strange intersection of Christian fundamentalism and techno-salvationism

* Grok’s ‘Mecha Hitler’ meltdown was the natural product of xAI forcing it to have a right-wing bias

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

06:59 — Science fiction as a place for political experimentation

12:17 — Why far-right libertarians turned away from philosophy toward science fiction

21:34 — Editor John W. Campbell’s massive right-wing influence on sci-fi

30:16 — Engineering versus research science kind of overlaps politically for speculative fiction authors

37:47 — Is the political left missing the potential for AI as the perfect reason for a basic income?

40:40 — Robert Heinlein’s evolution from socialist to authoritarian capitalist

49:48 — Heinlein’s increasingly disturbing self-focused view of sexual liberation

54:34 — Jeffrey Epstein as the pinnacle of authoritarian liberation

01:04:11 — More humane sci-fi authors

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Jeet Heer. Hey, Jeet, welcome to Theory of Change.

JEET HEER: Oh, it’s great to be on.

SHEFFIELD: Yes, it’s going to be a fun discussion today, I think. And we have the perfect news hook, which is that Elon Musk recently announced that he is basically abandoning his Mars focus with SpaceX to be focusing on a moon base. Which actually coincides with what he has said is one of his favorite novels of all time.

And one that you yourself have written about as well. So maybe let’s kind of start there, if we could please.

HEER: Yeah, no, I, think the novel was to is Robert Heinlein’s Moon is a Harsh Mistress which is from the sixties, I think, 1966 very well regarded science fiction novel. Arguably I think one of Heinlein’s best, maybe his last great work Because he went into a long period of decline after that. It’s set in a future lunar colony, that is exploited by earth. And there’s a libertarian revolution modeled, largely on the American revolution. Although, interestingly, there are elements of the Russian revolution that are also alluded to. And the lunar colonists with the help of an AI, achieve liberation.

And then their goal is an anarchist future, like a moon where there is no government. and in the novel, he has this slogan [00:04:00] TANSTAAFL, there is no such thing as a free lunch, which he got from his fellow science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle which became then a major slogan of the Libertarian Party.

Milton Friedman’s son, David, used to walk around with a TANSTAAFL medallion kinda like a pimp outfit. So the novel has been very influential. And one the things in Heinlein’s work, both in that work and in other works, like The Man Who Sold the Moon, is the idea of space as a new frontier for capitalism.

this is a where. business can finally be unshackled from the regulatory state, and achieve a free market utopia. Which always seemed like very ironic and unlikely because the of declaration of the 20th done through massive state intervention. First with the Soviet state, and then like, as along with NASA in the American state.

But now it looks like, in our new century Elon and others are reviving this idea that space will be new frontier where capitalism can finally be liberated from earthly laws and regulations.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. And Heinlein is, so for people who are really into the tropes of fiction, that he kind of was the originator in many ways of the libertarians in space trope.

HEER: And we should say like, just in case aware, but Heinlein was one of the major American science fiction writers. I think among science fiction fans, there used to be idea of the big three or the big four. So it’s like Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein. Like these were the major figures of Anglophone science fiction and it’s hard to overstate like his impact.

I think like what Ernest Hemingway might’ve been to like American literature, Robert Heinlein was to science fiction. He was just a major figure [00:06:00] for like four decades, for the mid 20th century, and cast a huge shadow over the field.

SHEFFIELD: Extremely prolific as well.

HEER: Yeah. Huge. Yeah. Yeah. Hugely prolific. Often winning the top awards in the genre, and also spawning like a number of imitators. So like, the libertarian space, but also military science fiction comes out of Heinlein. A lot of—

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, I mean, we should say, yeah, Starship Troopers was his novel.

HEER: Yeah. Yeah. He wrote Starship Troopers. Yeah. And so, Yeah. I mean, like, we’ll talk more about him we progress, just as a sort of signifier like one should think of him as of the major figures in this genre.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. And one of the other things about him that he has in common with some of the other people we’ll be talking about is that especially, starting with Moon is a Harsh Mistress a lot of his novels are characterized by having a character that’s basically a stand-in for himself.

HEER: Yeah.

Science fiction as a place for political experimentation

SHEFFIELD: And this character goes on and on for pages at a time. And it basically became a thing for right wing what, I call authoritarian capitalists, so post-libertarians, whatever you want to call them, that they abandoned the idea of philosophy and they turned to fiction instead to make the exposition of their ideas.

HEER: Well, think about like science fiction has always been literature of ideas. And obviously the sort of like novel of ideas is something that has deep like one way I can think of like Voltaire, you know Candide, many other sort of classical works.

And even like going, back to the Middle Ages like sort of religious works, like the sort of mystery plays. Like, a that explores concepts and which has characters that are sort of figureheads for different positions.

SHEFFIELD: Pilgrim’s Progress.

HEER: Now what happens in the, Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver’s Travels.

SHEFFIELD: Ben, Ben Hur. Yep.

HEER: Yeah. But [00:08:00] what happens in the 19th century is that with the sort of rise of the novel, the realistic novel of family life business like novels of Jane Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, that becomes a kind of dominant literary form.

The novel of ideas like heads off into genre. It becomes more associated with fiction that is like imaginative and, what we now call science fiction. Although that term is, really popularized in the 1920s. But like, I’m thinking of people like mary shelley’s, Frankenstein and she herself of like two great

SHEFFIELD: Mary Wollstonecraft

HEER: Yeah, absolutely. W Craft and a Good Goodwin. Their father was a philosophical liberal who wrote ideas.

And Frankenstein is this idea of, using extrapolation. ideas. and tradition was carried through by people like Jules Verns and H.G. Wells. And the interesting thing is it’s overwhelmingly, tradition of liberalism and the left, the socialism. It is a tradition of people who are coming out of the Enlightenment, who believe that history is change, that humans can actually take control of history and make history, as against earlier ideas that like, reality is fated, is providential and destined.

And then these novels of ideas are explorations. Well, what happens when we try to take control of history? What are the consequences good or bad? Obviously in Frankenstein, like it is, like this is like how the could go bad. it could actually like, lead to creations of monsters.

One sees that as well in like huls. Invisible man. But combined with that, there’s also tradition ideas of like, whoa, what ways in which yeah. Control of reality to make it better? Like utopian fiction,

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Edward Bellamy.

HEER: Edward Bellamy but also at wells’ Shape of Things to Come.

There’s a, long tradition of this. So, I mean, what’s interesting is that, [00:10:00] at some, I mean this show the to which libertarianism does come out of classical liberalism, what they call classical liberalism, but which is, this enlightenment project of amelioration and control of destiny that Heinlein I think is very that is a transitional figure.

He came out of the sort of the thirties he was a very much in the of hs later moved to the right. and there’s, whole like science that comes out of that. And one can see if one is interested in ideas, that this is the type of literature that, one is interested in politics, this type of literature that would be appealing.

Murray Rothbard, a major figure of the Austrian economics and very much an authoritarian libertarian, in his autobiography, he talks about how his mo mother loved uh Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and he could never understand why she loved them. And then in the 1950s, he read Ayn Rand’s the Fountain Head, and Atlas shrugged. And you realize, wait a minute, this is This is powerful. This is what literature can do.

And so, it, this is the literature that is appealing. For like politically engaged, politically active, and, heinlein, tradition of sort of, increasingly, way science fiction people like Jerry Pournelle, Larry Nevins, and some ways, one could cynically very true of that one of the appeals that in ways this is, a way the future of and also as in dreams working out tensions that, you can’t work out in life. So in Heinlein, one often sees, in Starship Troopers, one sees war without pTSD because they’re just killing the, these there’s no moral cost to war.

In his sort of sexual fantasies, like Stranger in a Strange Land, one sees the utopian dream of sexual liberation like, any of [00:12:00] consequences of s and in a Moon is a Harsh Mistress is imagining a sort of utopian libertarian, world on the moon like, the sort of ecological and class tensions that emerge in every existing historical capitalist society.

Why far-right libertarians turned away from philosophy toward science fiction

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. and, it is it’s related, I think, so yeah, the, you have the emergence of the, novel of ideas. But, it became more important for authoritarian capitalism because well, because these ideas are not very coherent, frankly. And they don’t, they, they don’t, so they, can’t really work as philosophy, because if you’re writing a book of philosophy and you put it out there and have a big giant, volume and you’ve structured your argument and you’ve exposed what your true objectives are and where you want like. If they were to do that, people would be horrified, at what they want, right?

And, like, and, Friedrich Nietzsche is the, example for that. But, and, I’ll come back to him in a second, but you know, like, so essentially we, but we saw this also with regard to economics as well, with this idea of Von Mises’s praxeology, that I don’t have to prove my arguments using data or historical instances, I just have to appeal to common sense because I can say, I can invent a scenario.

And then that was literally what this guy largely did in his, work, is that he would invent scenarios and be like, okay, so we know this will happen because it’s obvious that this is what they would do.

HEER: And like yeah,

SHEFFIELD: that’s his work. And then, so of course this, a movement of that nature would, tend toward fiction, I would think.

HEER: Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. And the science fiction writer Samuel Delaney, very different politics in Heinlein, but admires Heinlein, but did say that like I, one [00:14:00] thing Heinlein was doing was trying up with scenarios that would justify, right wing politics. That’s to say like, in what circumstances would it be justified to deny everyone except people who belong work military, and, also to carry on a war of extermination.

Well, if you do have like, humanities has existential threat these space are bugs, who have like consciousness, no morality then kind of war of extermination carried up by authoritarian military regime might be what is necessary, right? So he’s constantly trying to up with scenarios whereby what he is politically desires. Makes sense?

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. and and that certainly is the case with regard to Ayn Rand as

well.

HEER: Yeah,

SHEFFIELD: So she, she called herself a philosopher, actually. And then, but no one that I know of who has any sort of respectability regarded her as a philosopher.

Because she, wasn’t doing philosophy. She was just writing novels and, op-eds, like that was her output. She was not doing any kind of systematizing or and that’s significant because when you look to the politics of these people, their, descendants like Elon Musk and other people like them.

They don’t, they hate debate. They don’t like it, they don’t like to be questioned. They don’t like it when you say that their ideas are dumb and here’s 20 reasons why they get angry at you. And, and like, or if the, even if you want to track their jet, like the Elon jet guy, he’s going to, he’s going to ban you for doing that.

So they, they, can’t do this. Like, philosophy is based on argument. Like, you get two philosophers in the room, you get five opinions. and, so, they, can’t handle it, I think.

HEER: Yeah. I should say like, with a novel of ideas though, like there are like, sort of, variations on it, I do think like the sort of [00:16:00] greater novels of ideas are the ones where there is some sort of actual philosophical debate where you have like, contestants that both kind of making, semi plausible or, treated with some degree of respect and then you have to some sort of like, difficult to resolve,

um, issue Ambiguity. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would say, like someone like dostoevsky even though he has a very reactionary point of view, doing sort of novels of ideas where different positions are And there a term that the literary critics use, coming out of Bine is polyphonic.

That these, are presenting a range of and being contested in the work of fiction. And I think one of the interesting things about like Heinlein, kind of illustrates this, is I actually do feel like his earlier work which I regard as his of the forties and fifties.

Is polyphonic. There is like range of different voices but that he’s increasingly, there’s a kind of authoritarian turn in his fiction where it does really become a kind of hectoring voice. Where, you basically have these characters that are like Lazarus long, where like stand-ins for Heinlein who voices opinion. if there are other characters, they just stand around and either, they exist like, sort of Socratic foils.

SHEFFIELD: You’re absolutely right. ChatGPT.

HEER: yeah. No, Exactly. Exactly. And i I think one that not just the problem’s, not just that they’re using fiction, but like a lot of, it’s that what I consider like a bad fiction of ideas, one in which there’s not a contested stakes or a, polyphonic range of voices.

SHEFFIELD: Okay. Yeah, that’s, that, that is a fair point and I’m, glad you said that. Well, and, in that regard though, one of the other kind of problems that a lot of this fiction has is that the authors who are pretty much all men, except for Ayn Rand they don’t know how to write women.

They don’t know how to write about them or how [00:18:00] to, or how their characters are authentic in the, in of, themselves. So like every, character in Heinlein who’s a woman, she’s she’s got big boobs and she’s incredibly sexual and, everyone loves her.

And he’s super competent and witty and and it just like, after a while you would think he would’ve thought, okay, maybe this is a little annoying to have the same character all the time.

HEER: Yeah,

SHEFFIELD: But yeah, Just like flighty and dumb and like, so just cliche female characters.

HEER: Yeah. no. I think a sort of like a fair criticism. I, think one way there’s a, critic, Farrah Mendelsohn and a few other people have sort of this, think one thing with Heinlein was that he wanted to imagine a world of sort of sexual equality. Um like, his sort of, progressivism in the thirties and forties when he kids out of wells was a belief in free, love and also, female equality. So, his women characters were like, like engineers.

They had some, but then they would also always like, let’s have lots of babies, let’s we get but the, problem he had he was trying to imagine a world like gender equality, but let he had no basis for like imagining that world would be qualitatively different and that women would have other demands that would make changes.

So what he’s ended up imagining world the two genders are basically the same, that the women like all the desires of and also that there’s no conflict. Everyone is happy in this free love utopia. And There’s heartbreak. There’s no, love triangle. There’s no, in and out, out of love.

I mean a real kind of like a problem with the sort of like emotional range or imagination or a level of empathy in the work.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And, we’ll [00:20:00] come back to that as we circle back to him as kind of the of, sci-fi right wing sci-fi. But, like, just to circle back to the philosophy kind of thing, like to, I, think that in, in so many ways, Friedrich Nietzche is the apotheosis of all reactionary thought.

It never got better after him. Everything was a decline after him. And which is ironic, or maybe, he would say that was inevitable, perhaps. and his writings, are just, various seic. but one of the things that he says, in multiple different ways at d in different books is that, things that are true, they don’t have to be proven through argument, and that basically having to make an argument is for cucks, essentially.

HEER: Yeah, yeah. yeah,

SHEFFIELD: And that’s kind of another thing that you do kind of see within this authoritarian capitalist milieu that comes after him. They all kind of have that opinion, even if they’ve never read Nietzsche which is interesting, I think.

HEER: Yeah, yeah. The kind of the way I would describe it in not just Heinlein, but this sort of like broader tradition is, a kind of imperial self, is the idea that the self has an authenticity and authority and is, can be a final word. And so it does tend to lead to the writing of fiction that is simply a bunch of op-eds, which you simply have a bunch of characters that are opinionating and and there’s no necessity for kind of like a broader engagement with other voices or with conflict.

Editor John W. Campbell’s massive right-wing influence on sci-fi

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And of course, so there’s a natural inclination to this, but it also within the realm of, righting fiction it was cultivated also in particular by a guy named John W. Campbell, who was a very long serving editor of the magazine, which actually still exists. Now Analog Science Fiction. And, but at the time it was called Astounding was the [00:22:00] main word for it. When, mostly when Heinlein was writing for it.

But, so Campbell himself was extremely white right wing, and actually probably more and more so than heinlein. And a lot of it, I mean, he, supported segregation. Can you talk about that?

HEER: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, No, so, so, so, so Campbell like, so, so science fiction as I mentioned this, European tradition of Verne and but within america, it really like emerged in of pulp fiction of these like magazines where the writers were paid, like, like a penny, a word and was at a very kind of crude, literary level.

A lot of it sort of just like, maybe ancestor of things like Star just like slam bam.

SHEFFIELD: Or King Kong. Yeah.

HEER: Huh. King Kong. King

Yeah. Kin Kong. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Just like, yeah, Just like, action adventure. with a lot of scientific rigor or philosophical content. cheap genre fiction.

Edgar Rice Burroughs is Mars would be like prominent example of this. now Campbell who had like a little of a was a dropout at, mit, MIT had engineering background took over, astounding in the late like 1930s. And to he very successful in kinda like elevating science fiction by, like insisting on a greater level of scientific rigor.

Like he

basically said,

he wanted the fiction and astounding to be

like an issue of the Saturday evening post, but if

it was like written like, a hundred years in the future. And what became known as hard science fiction. So a lot of emphasis on things like, like engineering and, well more rigorous extrapolation.

He recruited a whole bunch of very influential writers Isaac Asimov. Arthur C. Clark theater Sturgeon. But one aspect of Campbell himself was that it, it this element of extrapolation and rigor was one side of his personality, but he is also like very divided amongst himself.

And he had a kind of like, [00:24:00] lifelong attraction towards pseudoscience. And famously like, one of his writers was l Ron Hubbard who’s also a friend of Heinlein. And the l Ron Hubbard was a, pule science fiction writer, but then came up with this sort of crackpot form of psychoanalysis called dietetics.

And the very first place dietetics was ever shown in the world was in the pages of astounding science fiction. It was as an article in Astounding Science Fiction, and it became the Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: And loved it.

HEER: Loved it. And Campbell said had a that sort of like nasal congestion and he credited, dietetics with curing his nasal congestion. There were a lot of science fiction writers in that circle.

Dietetics began within science fiction and a lot of writers in world such as, e van bar. Kathleen many others, early Scientologist. I mean, I, think I, Highland’s book, stranger in a Strange Land is kind of like an working of like, what happens when a science fiction writer creates a religion ironically itself the of war religions. But, I the Dianetics episode, Campbell like increasingly was attracted to sort of like crackpot ideas. So the pages of Astounding, a science fiction magazine, but they also published like nonfiction articles. He would publish articles touting perpetual motion machine that someone had discovered.

The Dean would have articles on telekinesis and eSP and--

SHEFFIELD: And supplement food supplements too, actually.

HEER: Food supplements. he very strongly built that when the f findings, he was a smoker. And when the ideas that came along, when the discoveries came along that, ca smoking causes he would publish like saying like, why, they’re And one way to think about him is, I think he was actually a type of person that is now quite familiar, which is the sort of, like the contrarian crank, right? Like whatever mainstream [00:26:00] science And he would use the same that now hear, like, like, well, like, we can’t accept the consensus, because Galileo came along and the scientific, he scientific consensus and, the consensus was wrong, right?

So, so, so he used that kinda logic to like constantly the other for these, contrarian, ideas and, like, as well into the realm of. of politics like, the defendant, not just segregation. He would publish editorials like, why slavery was actually like a good thing. And this was like well beyond hein line.

SHEFFIELD: And also rejecting black characters.

HEER: Has yeah. Yeah. Famously, and Samuel an African American science fiction writer, sent him or this agent sent him nova a, science fiction novel, with a, black character.

And, Campbell told the great book. I would love to publish it, but I can’t imagine, in the future you would have African astronaut. And so, yeah. Yeah. No, and within the fiction itself, like we’re talking about the we were talking his nonfiction ideas but within the fiction itself in sort of berian science fiction, there’s a very emphasis on Like he this was a major in many of the writers dealt with it, with the of like, can we actually create a Superman an Uber wrench that will go beyond and have the kind of telekinetic powers? Yeah. Yeah.

And the the sort of this. Although one that maybe shows, the way of his outgrew own politics, is, Frank Dune which was first published in Astounding which is taking, like all the ideas in dune are the, from the astounding tradition.

So it is this world Galactic empire genetic engineering to create a uber wrench. Superman.

But if one reads, like, I think Bert, like, I think it is even in the first do in the subsequent do which and astounding tellingly enough, it is very clear that this is to be a [00:28:00] bad thing. Like meant to show that, if you create this kind of superior being, he will like disrupt the universe in a very horrible and lead catastrophe.

So, this goes back to the idea of like novel of ideas. I think if, of ideas like works out the of, an issue, there’s some there.

But, certainly, Yeah, I think Berian science fiction, increasingly was right way and so much that Campbell lost his best writers. I think it is not an accident that in the last decade of astounding of his editorship, he died in the early seventies. Like people like Isaac Asimov

SHEFFIELD: Or he went and started his own magazine

HEER: Yeah, he started his own mind. But, people like Leo, like people who had been coming out of Campbell science fiction weren’t writing for him because Ha Campbell clearly wanted a specific type of fiction, which is like adventure fiction, where human characters defeat aliens because this he said like, have a novel story where aliens defeat humans because that’s just not possible. Humanity has to be the greatest the universe.

And I’m sorry, like, if you’re dealing with a, picture of ideas people who written like Thomas and I’ve written novels defeat humans because that should be a possibility. Like it is possible that we are not the summit of creation, right?

SHEFFIELD: Especially if they can come here. We’re, not the smart ones in that scenario.

HEER: Yeah. no. But, I mean, within Campbell’s, like his editorial mandate was humanity always win and there always has to be a to problems. it is but as I said, I think like in terms of, we’re talking about the politics, I that he was a sort of precursor of this kind of like, much more prominent, like, do your own science distrust.

Like, you the establishments like and attraction crackpot ideas. And of that see in like Hy I like if give him any sort of he’s [00:30:00] modest that. he would actually, he had arguments with Campbell particularly on like racism where like, the hy like, had very dodgy, stuff.

But actually try to be, he was aware of the and he did try to like imagine a sort of multiracial future.

The dueling epistemologies of engineering and research science within sci-fi

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and yeah, with regard to this, mentality though, of crack pottery and the political valence of, the fiction, I think that in some ways one could argue that. So when you look when you look at science as a profession there’s basically, very broadly speaking, there’s two types of scientists that you could say that an engineer is a scientist.

And often they are said to be. But, then there’s also the, research scientists, and the research scientists, they have to be collaborative. They have to exist within a community and bounce ideas off of each other and correct each other and accept correction and, be open to new ideas, and work as teams because, especially as science became more and more complex, as obviously the Manhattan Project is the kind of the first real illustration of that, that this is not a thing that could have been done by one person.

And all major scientific projects that is now the case. There is not any scientific major discovery now that is done by one person. Doesn’t happen. And and so, so they have a communitarian tradition and ethos. And that is why research science, when you look at polls, they do tend to be overwhelmingly more liberal, or, democratic in the us.

And whereas engineers, they, operate from what they think are first principles. In other words, things that are true then they extrapolate from them. And so, and that inherently, I think one could argue engenders an epistemic sandpoint where [00:32:00] I’m just applying what’s true.

HEER: Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: And, you don’t have to discover what is true or how do you even know what is truth or how, how, could you arrive at truth.

They don’t have to answer those questions because they’re not, those questions are already settled for what they do as a profession. And Heinlein was an engineer.

HEER: No, Heinlein was very much an engineer., I mean, like, I what you say is true, i’d also ask, emphasize the of educational aspect of engineering, but I think there is a sort and sort of like binary thinking of true false rather than, sort of a hermeneutics of knowledge that is sort of peer reviewed and tested, the realm of science fiction.

I do think of the science in the sort of tradition, is old fashioned, like in the sense that they’re always imagining lone inventor, What the, literary critic John Klu calls the Edison aid edisonian fiction, like, you’re imagining Thomas edison figure. Who’s like working in his and something that is considered mian science. to And that has actually Not been like actual been true. Yeah, no.

SHEFFIELD: And like, we see that with fiction of Arthur C. Clark, for instance, like his fiction, transcends that, idea. and it, and, it’s not just, it isn’t just because of his political perspective. I think it’s also his professional

HEER: Yeah. No, absolutely. no, Yeah. Yeah. And I even say like, Asimov bobby, he does have the sort of like Kerry as genius, but I a works working out of like, what would the long term, collaborative project like the foundation entail, it is a different way of thinking about science.

And yeah, I do think that there is a kind of like right-wing view of science as the lone inventor which actually like, is very retrograde and, like, but had of resurgence thanks in part to Silicon Valley where you did kind of have this period where are early people were like [00:34:00] bill Gates or Steve jobs did

SHEFFIELD: Although, frankly, neither one of those guys invented much of anything.

HEER: No, they didn’t. there was like, there’s a kinda like the cultural mythology. The cultural okay. Elon Musk well. like, I think Elon Musk they’re all kinda like feeding into this idea that even though they’re working with teams they’re a Thomas Edison figure reinvented for the Like there’s a way in the that created for these figures and the way that they became the of companies allowed a kind of like a very and, I think what we could is a false of how works.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it is. And well, and, I would say that this is yet another example. And that the scientific community, broadly speaking globally and, also in the US and every country generally seems to have exhibit-- which some people sometimes call the scientist fallacy-- which is everyone else is, a scientist, everyone else respects science. Everyone else understands the scientific method and wants to use it in their own lives.

And that is not true. and I may import my own, HG Wells metaphor that, the Society of Science has become the Eloy and, we’ve, they’ve let this revanchist extremist, reactionary morlock group, exist without them, and now they’re coming for them, and Donald Trump is going after NIH and, tearing down these vaccine access and, all of these things.

And RFK Junior is telling people to load up on fats and steak and so like, basically they didn’t they didn’t educate the public about why this is good. Like they, people liked what the products of science, but they didn’t know how they were made and why this [00:36:00] is the only way that they can be made. That the scientific method is the ultimate invention.

HEER: Yeah, No, I think that’s true. And I maybe like, another, way to think this is that there’s a kind of disjunction between the republic of science, which is this kind of like incredibly collaborative, internationalist debate--

SHEFFIELD: Humane. Open to all identities.

HEER: Yeah. Yeah. With a sort of political economy that, was based on a different set of values, and the people who would be science, the or had a, like a different set of and where like-- even in the corporate world, like, you, could see there’s certain forms of corporatism actually like, kind of similar to science in of being like, like, involving large scale enterprises. But within like, capitalism, you had uneven development, and you had people, who are basically like Donald Trump, these old school predatory robber baron types. and as long as that, model existed, they were the sort of, Morlocks who could, who could exist to prey on the republic of science.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and I can say that myself as a former Republican, more luck. So I’m not dehumanizing anybody. I’m just talking about my former self!

HEER: Yeah. but, I mean, I mean, I, think that like a key is, this distinction in political economy between, this world of science that was created and political economic system that didn’t quite fully align with it. And yeah, causing a lot of problems. like, really now where, like whether this kind of, predatory capitalism is compatible with the of scientific research that we’ve seen, or whether it’s become a, just a tool or servant or handmaiden.

Is the political left missing the potential for AI as the perfect reason for a basic income?

SHEFFIELD: Yeah Yeah, absolutely.

Well, and there’s, another unfortunate kind of layer to this though, which is regarding current artificial intelligence research. So, the [00:38:00] reality is, yes, these things, they’re not minds in the same way that we are. But the latest models, they are really fucking good.

And if you think that these are just junk, like what you might have experienced in 2023 or something like that’s not the reality. Like the, they are very good now at, the, at appropriate tasks. So like, they’re not going to help you report a news story or like, they can’t do that.

There’s a lot of things that they can’t do, but, when it comes to writing programming code, they’re good at it. Like,

HEER: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: I have tested it. I know it works like and like it works for, like a lot of scenarios. And so it’s not, these things are not conscious, but they’re really fucking good.

And, like that to me is, should be an opportunity for the broader left to say, look, here is why we need basic income. Here is why we need right to housing here is why we need, right to jobs or, whatever. It, like, if you’ve never had in the post USSR world or let’s say, the post kind of rubber baron world that you were just talking about, we haven’t ever had a better argument for this is why government is good and why we need it.

And you, and so we better, work toward it because this will help you, whoever you are.

HEER: Yeah. Yeah. No, yeah, I know. I’m not an AI skeptic. I don’t it can I, don’t it’s going to, we’re, I don’t think we’re anywhere consciousness.

SHEFFIELD: Oh, I’ve written a whole essay on why it’s not.

HEER: Yeah. Yeah. And I even actually don’t see, based on what they’re doing, that this is the path for creating machine consciousness. But I mean, it is a path for creating machines that are incredible servants who And then it becomes like, who’s the master? Is it the broader democratic society, which is like my ideal, or is it going to be, a few plutocrats?

Whereas that’s going to be a very dangerous thing because you’re putting an immense amount of [00:40:00] a very few hands. And that has always been the kind of, I mean, I think that has been the great debate since the Enlightenment, since came to this realization that are not of history, but of history and can, take control of our collective then it becomes a question well, which humans? and which of science fiction. I mean, this genre has, flourished in the last it is the, form of most clearly addresses this question. Sometimes, we’ve discussed, giving bad answers. but I certainly, putting forward, I think the right question.

Robert Heinlein’s evolution from socialist to authoritarian capitalist

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I mean, I, would like to see better left-wing content about AI in the future. But putting that aside like to, just to go back to Heinlein, like, so a, as we’ve been saying, touching on briefly earlier, he was somebody who started off as a, socialist.

And then over his

HEER: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: Became more re Oh. Oh, wait. Oh, I, gotta give a plug for your article though, Jeet. So, so, but yeah, so for those who, do want to explore this further, Jeet wrote a really great piece in The New Republic. It was 2014 that explore that did a, it was a review of a, biography of Heinlein. So it’s definitely worth reading if you want to delve into this topic a bit more, but, okay. All right. I, gave you your plug there!

HEER: Yeah. Yeah. No, thank you.

No, I’ll, just like briefly run through because I, the headline’s own biography touches on so many of the things that we talked about in very interesting ways. Because, it is like born. In 1907. Like this kind a very interesting, this sort of like progressive who had been abolitionists like in like, they were like Missouri, Kansas.

I think they were like among the original sort of settlers that came in to, like, like make this a free state. And he was a big of science fiction, big reader of Wells, gets into the Navy. He gets TB, but then has this like amazing, naval [00:42:00] pension because he’d been an officer, so, like, which allows him like, during the Great Depression to like, get an education, try his at, a bunch of different things, like he’s tried to be a real agent, to like be a silver miner, ran for political office, and then finally became a writer.

But He, is able to do this because he had UBI, in

SHEFFIELD: He, had a free lunch.

HEER: He had free lunch, he got a great free and he acknowledged it at the time. Like he had, in letters he like, from the taxpayers of America. Um And, but a free, like a really a sexual revolutionary.

I think like, like his first wife there’s a story in the biography where she basically, slept with another man during honeymoon. And and then later, he would marry this woman uh, Zain and would like, she was also into free love, and his buddies would like, be sharing partners, wife swapping or whatever, including with L. Ron Hubbard. L. Ron Hubbard in a kind of interview said, like Heinlein basically forced me to sleep with his wife. But during this period in the thirties, forties, like a Wellesley and science fiction writer and the utopian science fiction that he wrote, one which was only published posthumously for us, the living, and one called Beyond This Horizon are fictions about UBI.

They’re of utopian fiction where somebody wakes up into the future and it’s like, well, wealth is socially created. One of the novels, one of the characters says, like, he says, where do I pay? He, goes in, he is a, from the present, wakes up into the future, says, where do I pay for food?

And says. Why would you pay for food? Like what sort of barbaric society would make someone pay for like a necessity like this? Of course we all, like every, all the food is free. but also with the dark side of that fiction, like he was always a kind of interested in eugenics, not, I would say in a racist point of view.

Because he often would have characters of all different races. In one case, he did a kind of anti Japanese novel during World War ii, where the plot came from Robert Ca. John W. Campbell gave him the plot, and, Hy would later say that the racism of the buck, yeah, he, would blame it on [00:44:00] Campbell.

but, law was a very enlightened figure. As I said, they had this open marriage then like, tries, falls in love with a much, younger woman who then brings in as a menage trois, but that doesn’t, is second wife, Lila, isn’t happy, becomes alcoholic. They divorce.

And then this new, he marries this the younger woman, Virginia, who is like a real, like, a Republican, con, free market conservative.

But I, don’t think it’s just necessarily the, the change of. Partners, but also in the fifties, the Cold War comes along, he’s very he is like, he thinks Eisenhower is too soft, like upset that Eisenhower is trying to negotiate nuclear testing with the Russians, and really goes off the deep end.

And I think the nature of his fiction changes as well, like, a lot of the fiction of the forties and fifties, there’s a story called Solution unsatisfactory, which is written in the early forties, which is atomic before they arose. basically saying like, we’re going to have to live with these things, but there’s no good solution, like going through like, whereas I think like after that right wing turn, which I think really solidifies with, the publishing of Starship Coopers, this militaristic novel. He really becomes the sort of Heinlein that, like is, the right wing figure, exploring ideas of, militarism total, free market capitalism. instead of saying like, food should be free one of his later novels, he, talks about a famine. And this is originally at the time of the famine in Ethiopia, he says, stupid people, they didn’t grow enough food.

Right? Like, so, so a total inversion, I think of his politics towards a kind of very selfishness with, I think maybe there had always been a little bit of a strand of that, because I think like in the biography makes clear, like from a very early age he had this sort of [00:46:00] philosophical attraction to the idea of salafism is that how I’m missing that?

SHEFFIELD: Solipsism. Solipsism.

HEER: Yeah, Solipsism. Yeah, solipsism. This idea, he age he thinking like, what if I’m all reality is a my And he would periodically write this in his fiction things like a they where, a character everything is just imagined.

A very interesting sort of story by all you zombies which is both or sex change a combination of time travel and sex change character to become his and so he is like, like basically has created himself. And in the fiction like this som really becomes tied in a sexual way towards ideas of incest and pedophilia. Really.

Like, like, so there’s a lot of, like where like in time for, Love. the main character Lazar Long lives basically forever. Most of the people in the universe his children. He, clones himself and has female clones that he has sex with. He has time travel, has sex with his mother. And a lot of the novels are about how the form of or individual self-expression is, is incest.

Yeah. And incest well which is all, justified on a of, well, is just fiction. just, trying ideas or whatnot. but, like, I mean, I, know what to say about that E except like it is in some ways rigorous, actually taking the idea of individualism, radical individualism Heinlein’s, you know, universe leads to this like, logical conclusion of, sex only with those that are closest to you.

And also, like, it doesn’t all matter because everything itself is just a creation of my mind. And then, yeah. Obviously I think it’s morally reprehensible and it does align with [00:48:00] a lot of what we’re seeing in the sort of Silicon Valley elite that we’re happy to with Jeffrey think, and who himself also has, like Epstein, all this interest in eugenics, he wanted to basically create a sort of seed farm where he would like have a huge number of children like Lazarus Long.

SHEFFIELD: Or Elon Musk

HEER: Or Elon Musk. Yeah, exactly. The, Like, like obviously like sort of morally reprehensible. I, wasn’t about hang Like I do think there’s a kind of interesting like rigor. Actually do think, like he’s like working out the of radical individualism in a like, I a lot of other away from.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, although oddly as much as he was talking about individual freedom for most of his novels, as far as I can tell, some of them are explicitly homophobic. And so, but he does have some amount of that. But yeah, like he, he, did, he doesn’t get to that point of working things out because, presumably if you are having full liberation, you would have sex with whoever you wanted to.

HEER: would include people of your own sex if Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, he, had this sort

SHEFFIELD: in

HEER: of really a classical sexist guy where he actually thought like lesbianism was great, but Bill Sexuality turned him off because do actually think that there are like lesbian characters. And

SHEFFIELD: actually

HEER: there sort of like also these very interesting contradictions.

He was like more open to transsexuals than he was to gay they are kind of like sympathetically portrayed change in his in his fiction. And I think that he actually had a close friend who had a sex exchange operation. And, this person like, has vision about how supportive Heinlein was.

So, so, so some very interesting sort of like, contradictions in his work.

Heinlein’s increasingly disturbing self-focused view of sexual liberation

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and, one of the other probably, I guess, arguably his most famous work, which you have mentioned a bit is his Stranger in the Strange Land book, which [00:50:00] does, I think is really what kind of, at, least in his public writing. So that’s kind of where I, it, he was an example.

So this book, I believe it was 1960 when it came out, if I

HEER: Yeah. Yeah. Early sixties. Yeah. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: And so it was like, in, in, a lot of ways it was a, touchstone of the new left hippie movement. And even though the guy that was writing it was not on the left, and that to me is one of the more other interesting things about him as an author and, other people in this milieu as well. Like Robert Anton Willison is another one.

That these are, these were guys that, that they actually were right wing libertarians, but for a long time, people on the left didn’t realize that these guys were right wing and only now during, like Q Anon and, Trump and whatnot.

Only now are a lot of people on the left realizing, oh, these people are right wing. Like, even though like the hippie, so much of hippie culture was always right wing, and you look at Timothy Leary and I, the guy was straight up libertarian. Like the whole idea of dropping out of society that was anarchism and going away and anti-government and anti society.

HEER: Yeah, antisocial I mean, I think that’s a, if I were to sort of back the most philosophically respectable this would the sort of, sort of Emersonian american tradition.

And within Stranger in a Strange Land, there’s an idea in the novel, we’re all God, we all create, in which is a sort of transcendental idea.

And it is very appealing like, on the left of anti-authoritarianism. which in practice, often do align with the right and also have this kind of like mystical strain. So now, as I mentioned, El Ron Hubbard created a religion, as did Robert Heinlein.

Like, in some ways I think Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein is doing, if not quite a satire, I think it was like trying to through what happened with this friend Hubbard and [00:52:00] imagining what new religion, would be like, if people did have these like telekinetic, know, these powers, Hubbard claimed.

But the irony is that Stranger in a Strange Land also led to like new religions being created. I think there’s actually like, like these churches that came out in Southern California, which were inspired by that novel.

And it’s almost a sort of a paradox of science fiction that this, you know, especially Campbellian science fiction that wanted to be so rigorous in scientific that like, like its sort of decadence early decadence, it hit like it really became mystical and cult-like in, in the case of Dianetics, so, so what became the pro, the promise of scientific rationality quickly succumbed to follow the cult leader.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And do a lot of drugs.

HEER: I mean, yeah,

SHEFFIELD: This, yeah. Well, okay, so just going back to the, sexual predation as a form of liberation, because that’s really kind of what we’re talking about. And, that is kind of a pretty strong theme in a lot of these later Heinlein novels.

HEER: Yeah. Yeah, No, think that there’s a kind of interesting, I mean, I think he was trying to work out what sexual liberation would mean, and once his that I think that he couldn’t quite re realize. this is, would be my great critique of the novels, which is not that there’s a of sex in there, but that there’s a lot of inconsequential sex that you don’t really get a sense of, like, a world where sexual activity, leads to heartbreak Or to like, emotional turmoil. where, like, or especially in the case of like incest, like, like obvious trauma, like, like he is tr he is like a free lunch. like, let’s, what if we could have all the sex we wanted? Without any consequences.

Well, Yeah. That would be you could only do that in of You [00:54:00] actually we live in just as you wanted, like, let’s have total free market capitalism and like, but it all works out great.

Yeah. Yeah, without consequences or how, let’s have like total militarism, where all space bugs And, nobody has like, shell shock or, PTSD or is damaged. Like,

SHEFFIELD: And there are no dissidents.

HEER: Yeah yeah, There’s no, yeah. Yeah. It like, this is the sort of critique of the kind of like later novel, like at every stage he’s like imagining his ideal world without consequences.

Jeffrey Epstein as the pinnacle of authoritarian liberation

SHEFFIELD: and yeah. And, going back to the Epstein angle here. So, Heinlein is actually mentioned in the Epstein files.

HEER: Oh is he? Oh, I, didn’t see that.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And he so there’s, an email that not by Epstein though I should say. But, there’s the, a German AI researcher named, Joscha Bach. And he’s writing to Epstein, and basically they’re having these long conversations essentially about fascism and how it might be good.

Epstein and Bach are doing that. And so I’m going to just quote from Bach here in when he says:

I rather like the treatment that fascism gets in the Amazon series The Man in the High Castle, which explores what would’ve happened if the Germans and Japanese had won the War. A society that tries to function as a brutal and ruthlessly efficient machine, eliminating all social and evolutionary slack.

It is very dark, but not a flat caricature of pointless evil for its own sake. Heinlein’s late book, obviously not late book, but Heinlein’s late book, Starship Troopers explores fascism too. But unlike Philip k Dick, he does not see it as a form of insanity, but as the most desirable order.

And Then he, goes on to say, I find your political incorrectness very fascinating.

(Laughter)

SHEFFIELD: So that’s, I mean, like, that’s what we’re [00:56:00] talking about here. Like this is, so essentially, what you’re saying, this idea of kind of liberty as, there’s always this tension of, well, who is liberty for, is it for the individual or is it for everyone in the society? And how, like that’s essentially what it comes down to.

And, Heinlein and this authoritarian capitalist, Nietzchean fascist, reactionary, whatever you want to call it it basically has arrived at the idea that liberty, we must maximize liberty for some people who can have all degrees of freedom. And that is the best way for humanity to survive and become a multi-planetary species as Elon Musk does.

HEER: Yeah. no. I another way to think this is. The role of democracy in like, all of this. And I mean, as I said, This is broad tradition. And I think like, democracy was late the tradition.

Like there’s actually something that came out because of the and socialist movement of the 19th Centuries were pushing for this. And then you had some people within the liberal tradition like John Stewart Mill, who okay, we’re going to have democracy then, we’re going to have to change our notions of liberty to a more broader sense of general welfare.

And in most case, also including like women and like, like imagining what a liberty for all would be in a democratic society where everyone has some say, in the polity. And I think that one way to define this authoritarian

SHEFFIELD: libert

HEER: libertarianism. Is that it doesn’t want to make that, thing.

And once hes is explicitly in Heinlein where like, you like in, time enough for love, he basically says, like, democracy doesn’t make sense. Like, why is it that like if some, 50 plus one, percent of the people say, believe true, like that’s the way should go.

Like, there’s no reason to have that, right. Well, [00:58:00] if you reject the idea that there, like we have to have some sort of like, system where like everybody’s voice is part of it and one has to attend to, other people’s voices and like, make some sort of compromises. If you, I think, Hein line and li authoritarian Libertarianism only works. If one rejects the Democratic imperative, if one says from the start, like, it doesn’t matter, what most people want, it’s like, what the elite want, And, then the characters in Heinlein’s fiction are this sort of glorified elite, like people who are, for whatever reason, genetics, intelligence, the superior beings.

And he’s very explicit about that, as you know.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, he is. And another quote from to sale beyond the sunset that I thought was notable of his. His political ideology. And of course, I suppose his diehard fans might say, well, he didn’t say these things. His character said these things. And it’s like, well,

HEER: But saying, like, I, I’ve read a nonfiction and the, a lot of his letters have been published now, it’s very yeah, it’s exactly as what would predict from reading these novels, because his hectoring voice that is all univocal. Like, one assumed that this is what Heinlein believes.

In the, in the letters he’s basically saying all the same things, but continue.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So I’m going to quote from it. So he says in To Sail Beyond the Sunset, which is literally an, ode to incest, basically of this novel. He says, democracy often works beautifully at first, but once the state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state.

For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit. That the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them. They will do so until the state bleeds to death or in its weakened condition, the state succumbs to an invader. The barbarians enter Rome.

Which again, the, [01:00:00] invasion metaphor, like that’s, the most constant metaphor that you see Donald Trump making.

And, I, and like, and I do think that’s why Trump is so appealing to these same people, because even though they know that he’s stupid and incompetent and corrupt, like they know all of that, anyone can see that, who’s not willfully blinded.

They know this about him, but they admire that about him actually, because he just does what he wants.

And in that sense, Donald Trump is the, the Nietzschean Antichrist Ubermensch. Because as he said, in the Antichrist, he explicitly. I’m not against Christianity per se, and I don’t dislike Jesus. I’m against this culture that you guys have built up of restraining the Ubermensch.

and so, Trump in a way is, this, Antichrist Ubermensch. And that’s why they like him.

HEER: Which I think it’s almost the best refutation of of

SHEFFIELD: Of why it doesn’t work.

HEER: Yeah. I think that’s right.

SHEFFIELD: And so essentially like that’s kind of what I think is, the, message that we’re getting out of these Epstein files. So like the more stuff that comes out that people are reading there, like Jeffrey Epstein had this mentality he was a right wing libertarian by the end of his life, whatever he was earlier, this guy was a libertarian capitalist oligarch, and that’s what he was trying to build.

HEER: Yeah, no, I think, that’s right. I I it’s about the evolution, seen, I, do think him as a fairly normal

SHEFFIELD: globalist, neoliberal

HEER: in the sort of like, nineties and two

SHEFFIELD: thousands.

HEER: But I think that once that I think a lot of these figures, if they meet any sort of challenge, in it was like a criminal case. I think the global financial meltdown a lot of these people like felt much more

SHEFFIELD: beleaguered

HEER: felt like, the like [01:02:00] retrench for a much more hard line politics.

And then they, did retreat away from any towards the public good, a politics of pure sort of selfishness of the Ubermensch.

So, yeah, I mean, I think that’s almost like a, in, ways they’re liberal when times are good. then become, libertarians, like, like, when times go bad. I, that’s the that’s the kinda like logic it. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And then Epstein also, like his, the, world that he was building for himself with these trafficked girls and women, like this, is the maximal individual liberty vision that, that these right-wing sci-fi authors we’re talking about.

This is the total sexual liberation that Heinlein was talking about. This is the actual version of what it looks like.

HEER: No.

SHEFFIELD: instead It’s not just a fantasy.

HEER: Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I, know, think that’s right. Yeah, I mean, another way to think about is in sort of the genre of science fiction. Yeah. I mean, I think that science is the kind of like life or the and development project of both the national security state and the sort of Silicon Valley sort of plutocracy.

Like I think a lot of people like Musk and Peter Thiel, a lot of this and then basically used it as a of like how to, and he because of his tuberculosis, he was not able to serve in the military, but like, sort of research stuff for the Navy in, during World War ii. he, basically up with a prototype for this spacesuit. But more broadly. A lot of his ideas, were taken up by sort of the RAND corporation and other outfits.

So, I mean, one way to see genre it’s, it is a place where like, early ideas this the i, think almost Southern California combination of military, industrial surveillance state technocrats, and libertarians, which is a contradictory [01:04:00] but I, think is like been worked together and infused together.

And that’s why the author of Starship Troopers is also the author of Stranger in a Strange Land.

More humane sci-fi authors

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. Well, thi this has been a great discussion, but let, if we can maybe end it with let’s turn to better sci-fi authors than these guys. Because as you said, there’s, and I do want to give a plug for my friend Ada Palmer, who is a historian and also a sci-fi writer.

HEER: Yes, I know her work.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And she explores a lot of these same themes, but in a much more humane way, but there are a lot of other authors, so I’m interested to hear who you might recommend in that regard for people.

HEER: Oh, okay. I think an interesting sort of counterpart is Ursula Le Guin who is coming out of sort of anarchism, but kind of like a left anarchism and in like The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed explored in a very interesting way of sort of gender equality and the trade-offs that might exist in an anarchic world where things are poorer, but, you have like a greater sort of social satisfaction.

So I think Le Guin in general is a, great example. Joanna Russ, I think explored, many these, same ideas.

I think there’s the more dystopian fiction writers are the dystopian tradition, obviously like Orwell and Huxley, but, forward by someone like Octavia Butler exploring the dark side of this and one sees that also like Philip K. Dick and JG Ballard who are interested in all the same things as Heinlein was, but maybe are like much more attentive to the social psychological consequences of this kind of future.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Okay, great. Well those are some starter recommendations for anybody who hasn’t already gone for those authors yet. So, you got any any things upcoming you might want to plug [01:06:00] for the audience to check?

HEER: Well, yeah, no, I mean, I just generally, write for the Nation magazine and have so, and to do the Time of Monsters podcast. So if anyone wants to hear more, from you can go to the Nation magazine and there’ll be a lot of content there.

SHEFFIELD: Okay, sounds good. Thanks for being here.

HEER: Oh, thanks. It was a, great conversation.

SHEFFIELD: Alright, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show, where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And if you’re a paid subscribing member, you have unlimited access to the archives and I thank you very much for your support.

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