Introducing a new feature in Nebula Magazine an editorial series byline, The Dystopian. Our columnist will appear monthly with notes about anything and everything Sci-fi from best authors to worst, fan works to fan fails and who’s running the fan pages that are on spot or off the rails. 

We promise The Dystopian will always be a good read and whether you like the feature or not we hope you’ll write to the editor, we love opinions. The Dystopian is the one place on the internet where Fans have a voice.

27 February, 2025

 

"They Finally Did It": Bias and Creative Output

Years ago, I edited a book for the first time. I was quite good at making sense of grammar and a champion speller, but knew that the writer also wanted assessments of the plot and characters.

 

 The book was a hero’s journey if heroism meant fulfilling a destiny to marry into a righteous family of superheroes. The in-laws quoted Reagan and the Bible and defeated liberals who were definitely the picture of scruffy anarchy.  I knew the politics of this author already, but the patriotic zealotry was unbearably heavy-handed.

With that in mind, I wrote her a note at the end of my edit:  “Your readers shouldn’t be able to tell who you voted for in every presidential election.”

Sometimes, personal perspectives date a work in unfortunate ways, but that does not make it the obligation of an author to remove them.  Quite the contrary.

In 2015, I went on a tour of Spanish Civil War sites in Barcelona and learned of George Orwell’s experience as a volunteer in that conflict. The guide included excerpts from his memoirs that showed his disillusionment and frustration at citizens choosing to turn on each other. I read 1984 in a new light the following year.

Similarly, I would have extracted very different meanings from  The Crucible if I hadn’t known about Arthur Miller’s denunciation as anti-American. I would not have looked at his  representation of the Salem Witch Trials and interpreted them as an indictment of McCarthyism.

Speculative fiction ventures beyond our current understanding and demands imagination of consequences.  Consider for a moment the ending of the original Planet of the Apes. After witnessing the devolution of humans and their subjugation by primates over 2000 years of history, astronaut Taylor goes in search of answers in the Forbidden Zone that was once a lush paradise. There, he finds the ruins of a structure, first visible only in parts. Falling to his knees, he says that “they finally did it.”  Then, screaming at the “maniacs” who destroyed this place, he damns generations of humans to hell. It is then that we see him collapsed in front of the Statue of Liberty. The wasteland that has doomed humanity is what remains of his home.

On the other hand, we have Interstellar, in which humanity survives because of the desperate actions of a father trying to reach his daughter across space and time. The film shows many instances of futility and failure, but persistence and the intangible ties that bind are the X factor.

Both of these examples do not create the story free from bias. It is the privilege of authors to use their own convictions to shape possibility and readers of the present can be taught by what possibilities we see.

 

Until next month - The Dystopian

 

Letters to The Dystopian may be sent to NebulaMagEditor@gmail.com 

subject - Editorial.  

 

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10 January, 2025

Brace yourselves, we may be lost to history

Perhaps it’s time we rethought Science Fiction, at least the purpose of it. At the current pace of technological change by the time an author pens a new story technology has likely already advanced either beyond the story’s magic or to a point that the narrative seems quaint.

Science fiction must then be more. I submit that in this year and at this time and place we have an opportunity to redefine science fiction and recognize the genre’s real nature that is to predict the future and not just the science or technology of the future but the social and political future. After all some of the best science fiction of the past have always been those stories that accurately envisioned mankind’s future: Things to Come, Destination Moon, 1984 to name but a few. 

How do we do this? Given the recent US election we can likely make an accurate assumption about American society in the near future, say twenty-five  years hence, one generation to the year 2050. It might begin something like this:

By 2025 The United States had witnessed the passing of most of the third generation to be born following WW2. The conflict that ended in the defeat of German aggression and halted the threat of a European dictatorship all but forgotten. By generation two, most children had lost sight of the purpose, the reality of WW2 and began to question the history—did the holocaust actually happen, who were the villains, who were the heroes? 

You might see where I’m going, just four generations into the future the United States may have become what we had fought to eradicate, America could well be a dictatorship because we failed to teach history, we began banning books and stopped foreign immigration. We ceased teaching our children lessons in civics and replaced those lessons with classism, racial separateness and sexual stereotyping. In 2024 just under three fifths or 90M eligible US voters took to the polls and a full forty-nine percent of all Americans now followed a cause, a trend, toward isolationism and conspiratorial mania.

Until next month - The Dystopian

 

Letters to The Dystopian may be sent to NebulaMagEditor@gmail.com 

subject - Editorial.  

 

Your letter may be chosen to publish a response, please provide a first name. Your contact information will not be made public.