nice…

What I actually meant by “any given event unfolds as it ’should’” was “any given event unfolds as it always and inevitably will”.

I also just realized that my reaction to the senator episode was also “there’s what could happen when you try to fit every situation, no matter how little you know about it, into your preferred political framework.” Political frameworks are helpful, but we still haven’t come up with one so perfect that it explains every historical event ever.

Well, except the real point here (which for some reaon I’m not seeing brought up very often in these debates) is that there is no reason to believe that because a protagonist expresses a point of view, or because a single scene unfolds a certain way, that that is simply “the way things are” in a book’s univere. It is simply *not possible* to fit every event in the world into a purely liberal (or purely conservative) narrative. In fact, I had always felt, or hoped, that liberals generally did face reality – a huge, complex, often random system – rather than avoiding, simplifying, or deliberately misinterpreting reality for the sake of their preferred political narrative as conservative/Republicans so often do, which is why I’m comfortable aligning myself with the liberal camp.

My initial reaction to the former senator’s episode in OMW was to think “well, yes, that’s what you might get for assuming aliens are necessarily anything at all like human beings, with comprehensible motivations and the ability to engage in debate with us.” That, of course, is partly a product of my reading the book as science fiction military adventure first and seeing political/social implications as secondary. Even so, though – you could also see it as random: the senator’s approach could (with a few tweaks) have been the right one, but the aliens simply responded unreasonably. That happens, yes? And there are not very many other actual events in the book that support a real right-wing hypothesis, such that the overwhelming preponderance of events fitted to such a narrative would make the book “right wing” as a text, regardless of Scalzi’s personal politics.

Books’ authors deserve a little more credit than to assume that they believe any given event in their stories unfolds as it “should,” or that the setting or political systems in their books are the “right” ones. It reads as obvious when you type it out, but somehow people manage to engage in debate while ignoring it.

…if Scalzi decides to write fiction that’s quite right wing without any indication that said politics aren’t to be taken at face value then it’s fair enough the people say “that’s a right wing novel”.

I have sympathy with Nicholas Whyte as well. As I say, his reaction was my first reaction. But Scalzi seems quite within his rights to also say, judge the first novel (story, character, politics and all) by the way the trilogy develops (especially since the first novel was clearly always intended to be the first in three).
And, while “Old Man’s War” might well be a “right wing novel” the things that sustain the right wing politics of the first book are subsequently, devastatingly, undermined in the later books. When viewed as a whole, the GST clearly has a liberal rather than reactionary agenda.
Had the three 300-odd page novels been published as a single 900-odd page novel (hey, if fantasy can do it…) then the liberal credentials would be clear.

I think that the key issue, from a critic’s point of view, if that actually, Scalzi has no better insight into the politics of Old Man’s War than Whyte does. He can talk about the intended politics but as far as the actual politics go, Whyte’s guess is as good as anyone and if Scalzi decides to write fiction that’s quite right wing without any indication that said politics aren’t to be taken at face value then it’s fair enough the people say “that’s a right wing novel”.