How Science Fiction Made Me Liberal
More than anything, the genre challenges us to imagine beyond the status quo
Some of the first science fiction books I loved were in a YA series called The Tripods Trilogy, by John Christopher, about a future ruled by a race of invading aliens called “the masters” who rove around the country in Wellsean tripods. Human civilization is kept at a medieval level, and young people are “capped,” or given surgical implants to control their thoughts, at age 14 — which happened to be my own age when I read the books, at a time when our very nice pastor was starting to drop around the house to ask when I was going to get baptized. It’s an age when adolescents are beginning to develop abstract and critical thinking skills, and some of them are starting to feel as if they’re being brainwashed into docility and conformism, into accepting their place in a stagnant, ovine society ruled by unseen monsters.
I grew up reading science fiction for the same reasons a lot of brainy adolescents do: it tended to avoid messy human relationships (especially sexual ones) and was all about the kinds of big ideas that fed and stretched developing minds. It’s the same reason science fiction was ghettoized for decades: Until the New Wave of the ’60s, at least, it wasn’t primarily concerned with the things we associate with serious…
