From the SFRA Review
Spring 2025
Ian Campbell
I write this on the one hundredth day of the new regime. We’ve all read about or seen the numerous authoritarian/fascist regimes in science fiction, but what they all tend to have in common is basic competence. Say what you will about the Empire in Star Wars, but they’re predictable and appear to keep the trains running. After three months of this, we’re lost in a farce, with Photoshopped tattoos, tariffs on a whim, poll numbers dropping like rocks into gravity wells and a rotating cast of sycophants and plastic surgery disasters.
Yet farce is like SF, in a way: both hold up mirrors to our own world in order to estrange via distortion what’s happening to us and why we permit it to happen. Farce and SF are instructive, above and beyond their entertainment value. Having a ketamine-addicted oligarch waving a chainsaw about as a means of signaling the end of public health programs in a farce (or SF) would be indicative of our own complacency or failure in allowing manifestly terrible people into positions of power, our own shortsightedness in coming up with excuses to make the perfect the enemy of the good, the sheer lunacy of allowing billionaires to exist in the first place.
Perhaps we’ll learn from the estrangement. Consider Asimov’s Foundation novels, where the repugnant Mule strolls in and uses powers of manipulation to twist the system in his direction. “A master of deception, only interested in pillage and plunder”, he takes a system that was indeed in need of serious reform and wrecks it for his own delight and profit. In the novels, the Mule (who poses as a clown) is defeated because his maniacal persistence in searching for and defeating those who might represent an alternative center of power prevents him from maintaining control over his conquered populations. He has no allies, only yes-men and opportunists, and this proves his undoing. Perhaps SF does provide us models for reversing authoritarianism, in addition to its function of deconstructing our received assumptions. Most fictional galactic emperors, I feel compelled to note, don’t reverse themselves when their trade partners refuse to comply.
Yet the defining feature of farce is that it’s intended to be funny. And while there are, to be sure, many things about our new overlords that stimulate our sense of humor, there’s nothing funny at all about what’s happening to our most vulnerable populations. Trans people being erased, exhibits being removed from the African-American museum at the Smithsonian, the wanton destruction of our economy, the destruction of a century of alliances in order to cozy up to ghouls and psychopaths, the open love for cruelty of all sorts, the summary deportation of international students for free speech or minor traffic tickets, the illegal detention of all manner of innocent people, the sending of many of those people to what is obviously a death camp in a foreign country contrary to every principle of our constitutional republic… all of these together, under the dominion of a diaper-wearing clown gangster, are the sort of thing that would have a literary agent or editor saying it’s too over the top to be published.
It only looks like farce, and it’s only SF in that what is called “artificial intelligence” is making the decision to destroy the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people who have made national service the defining feature of their lives. In SF, these intelligences are often actually intelligent instead of just pattern mimics, and when they run societies, it’s generally benevolent and oriented toward equality. In Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels, the AIs take care of every human need except the desire to be useful; in Surface Detail, the AIs go to great lengths (and take great pleasure in) comprehensively destroying a world-dominating oligarch.
The real genre we’re in now is not SF nor farce, but horror, where the characters’ hubris inspires them to ignore obvious warning signs in order to see what might happen, and then suffer existential threats.
In this issue of the SFRA Review, we offer perspectives on modes of governance SF provides us. Because SF generally works via estrangement, we might well view these alternative modes of governance as takes on our own mode of governance. We hope that you will find these takes illustrative. We also have a call for papers, where we ask you for your short takes on the Nebula and Hugo nominees; this is on an abbreviated schedule so that we might publish them in three months rather than six. These do not have to be strictly academic opinions: we welcome a wide variety of perspectives on these works.
With respect to our real world in real need of estrangement, do not obey in advance. If forced under threat to modify your speech and actions, you have to make the decision that’s best for you. But do not modify your speech or actions just because you think the oligarchy won’t like it: at least make them work to try to silence you.
SFRA Review 