ITT: post and discuss science fiction and fantasy with leftist themes

Mars is Nazbol u shit. Literally Germany if Niekisch and Jünger had seized power. Don't believe me? The MCRN is Storm and Steel expounded in reality. Draper is a Nazbol mini Sankara in Space.

earth deserves to be destroyed desu

Is The Expanse good? Been watching Black Matter and really wanting to give up on American scifi television. Convinced the Japanese are the only guys with a clue how to do the whole space opera thing(not counting books). Only American space opera I've enjoyed was the original Star Trek. Didn't like The new Star Trek movies, Firefly, or Battlestar Galactica. This shit just can't live up to Galaxy Express 999, Space Pirate Captain Harlock, Space Battleship Yamato, Macross, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, etc.

I'm watching The Expanse at the moment and it's pretty decent - American TV sci-fi really had it's hey day in the 90s though, IMO. Dark Matter has it's moments and I enjoyed the first season more or less (though Wil Wheaton should not be allowed on TV tbh).

If you've never checked them out, try Babylon 5 and Farscape. Not huge budgets (and the early 90s CG in B5 which was pioneering at the time has not aged well), but they are cult favourites for a reason.

That said, if you really like Jap shit, then your taste is extremely sketchy to begin with so I don't really know what to tell you.

I like the Jap shit and I like novels. The Jap shit is objectively good and it is that way because it took direct inspiration from good books. Only reason the original Starwars shit was any good at all was because it knocked off Dune.

I agree that Star Wars sucks ass but how is Star Wars a knockoff of Dune?

It's a p decent TV show. I don't think its as good as the novels (except the bad novel holy fuck) but it's certainly a good adaptation.

star wars seems more like a rip off of the foundation series to me.

It's a science fantasy with much of the same themes and notes. (mental powers, desert planet, chosen one)

I think Lucas cited Dune as an inspiration, but I wouldn't call star wars a dune knock off.

Need I say more?

what about the greatest leftist fantasy of all: left communism?

leftcom is unironically the best position within the left

Have they ever accomplished anything outside the pages of a book?

and that is why it is a fantasy

meant for

yes, not make themselves look like fucking retards and taint their movement for centuries to come when their revolution reverts back to capitalism

tankies and anarkids actually have revolutions that succeed or fail tho

What? can you restructure that sentence? not memeing but don'e understand

Sounds interesting, but I'm kind of bothered by the idea that capitalism could even work in a solar civilization in the first place. How does private property work in an economy based around mining asteroids that could fling off into deep space? How does it function when even basic actions would require more resources than any Private company could realistically acquire.

A lot of sci-fi has capitalist interstellar civilizations, but beyond the obvious ideological reasons for pretending that capitalism is eternal, it doesn't make much sense. I think the blunders that have been the recent capitalist attempts to do what NASA and the USSR accomplished over half a century ago shows that Porky and space don't mix.

Am I the only one who thinks the Alien movies had a strong leftist undercurrent? The Weylan-Yutani Corporation is a harsh criticism of neo-liberal corporate culture with its 'profits before people' attitude and self destructive pursuit of domination. I also like the fact that in the first movie, the crew were largely blue collar and Ripley took command of the situation dispite not being management. And finally the portrayal of Ripley in the first movie as an ordinary woman who uses her intellect and interpersonal skills to overcome the villains is very refreshing compared to the usual hyper masculinity pushed by Hollywood (especially during the 70's and 80's).

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Well, you have rich people that have all the big guns, and if you try to take their private solar property they send people with those guns to come and shoot you.

I've always wanted to write a leftist fantasy where a peasant oppressed by a rapacious oligarchy goes on a quest to find "the true king," finds him, and puts him on the throne only to find that a king is just as oppressive, then in the sequel lead a revolution to overthrow the king and install democracy.

To be honest fantasy with too strong political contemporary implications tends to suck. Problem is that you establish a feudal world or the world of antiquity but implement modern political narratives. Democracy in a feudal world is aburd. You'd be better off by sticking to abstract philosophical concepts if you feel to elaborate it. Fantasy lives and dies with the plot and the characters, don't think about allegories before you have that.

If you want to get really political, I think dystopian/utopian SciFi works the best.

Yes, but that would be incredibly expensive, not something they could do on a regular basis, and they'd have little in the way of ensuring that the people who they sent to protect their property wouldn't just claim it themselves. Asteroids have lots of rare metals in them worth thousands of times whatever they'd be paying the mercs.

I don't think Earth and Mars are capitalist in the traditional kind of sense in The Expanse.

There is private property and wage labor. However, it's all segregated. Earth is like some UBI utopia where everything is automated as long as raw materials from the belt flow, and their leaders are technocrats, not unlike the EU bureaucracy.

Mars is some sort of NazBol military republic. Again, relies on the exploitation of the belt but not capitalist in the traditional kind of sense. It's definitely something which I can imagine humanity to be like in 200 years if there is no socialist revolution and if for some reason capitalism doesn't manage to kill earth and civilisation before.

It doesn't get better than this

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That doesn't even make sense. Are you trying to say that because democracy is "competitive", that somehow means it will create capitalism?

Because that's not how it works.

Democracy is the rule of the majority over the minority, its exploitative by default

We want anarchy not democracy (yes even commies do, they are just tsundere about it)

It's either that or a tyranny of a minority or not having a society at all.

Yes, even under anarchy.

You just out-post-left'd me, comgratulations

Daily reminder that anarchist theory and terminology is shit. Democracy =/= Modern, bourgeois democracy

You are retarded, democracy being exploitation is not even an anarchist axiom

Society is inherently about reaching some kind of consensus about various things. Where roads are placed and how they're maintained, where schools are placed and managed, and all the various other systems, structures and institutions that have to be created and maintained collectively by society need some kind of decision-making process to come about. That decision-making process can either be democratic, and therefore majoritarian, oligarchic or autocratic, and therefore minoritarian, or the decision doesn't come about at all and you don't have a society.

No, it's a right wing axiom. The idea of mob rule being oppressive stems back to the Bonapartists, and you'll generally see all sorts of right-wingers and monarchists make the same arguments as you.

Absolutely, Alien has pro-worker and lefty undertones. Actually the writers of The Expanse talk in an interview about how much of an inspiration the class consciousness of Alien was to their own story.

Uh, no.

Can you read? I said the democracy is an organizational form of the bourgeois state. And I explained what the state is, the abstraction of competitive contradictory interests (which makes it an apparatus for class rule of the bourgeoisie).

That maybe true, but that does not make you correct.
You aren't analyzing things as they are, but how you want them to be. That isn't how you materialism.

The rule of the proletariat in its councils is bourgeois in form, but not in content (like labor vouchers, for example). This contradiction is negated by the gradual self-dissolution of the proletariat, and its state, destroying the realm of politics, and, yes, that includes democracy.The state becomes a mere administrative apparatus.

I think Dune actually has some form of class consciousness. The hero saves an oppressed community who live being economically exploited by a corrupt empire that exploits their natural resources. It also ties in ecology as well with the transformation of planet dune into a hospitable planet. It's worth noting that Frank Herbert was brutally anticommunist too. You don't get this type of class consciousness in Star wars at all.

Expanse( I've only seen season 1 so far) is interesting (in ways that most Syfy shit isn't) in the sense that it perfectly encapsulates these themes and manages to be a bit more politically relevant too.

Other Sci-fi:
Star Trek - Mostly boring

Babylon 5 - Liberal historical materialism.
enjoyable and pretty good, No class consciousness ( a few episodes here and there deal with Unions and economic inequality on earth and mars)

Firefly - Typical Joss Whedon fanfare. Could've been great but not much happens in season 1.

Farscape - Love letter to the old style of sci fi serials (buck rogers) and star wars. Enjoyable but is average most of the time.

Lexx - Very cheesy and has very low view of Scifi. Season 3 is aesthetically and narratively interesting. Season 4 is quite the cringefest.

Lost - I've got nothing to say here

Battlestar Galactica - Reactionary stuff mixed with some shity new age crap.

The most recent Fantasy book I've read with some leftist themes is Midnight Tides. Reminded me a Little bit of Morrowind mixed in with some game of thrones. Neal Stephenson Fantasy/Sci Fi stuff is pretty good as well.

Here is some quotes from fantasy author scott bakker (overindulgent but in a good way):

"Both science fiction and fantasy are attempts to compensate for these impending phenomenological disasters. Both genres are consolatory. Where science fiction attempts to recover our lost horizon of expectation through narrative, fantasy attempts to recover our lost space of experience through narrative."

" If science fiction is comparatively ‘socially progressive,’ it has more to do with the implicit understanding that traditional biases against various groups will be progressively discredited, (leaving only the economically rationalized biases against the longest suffering and most systematically oppressed: the poor). In other words, it belongs to the transformation rules. Likewise, if fantasy is comparatively ‘actually reactionary,’ it has to do with the elimination rules: the associative connections between traditional biases and traditional conceptions of the world are difficult to overcome."

"In terms of what Heidegger calls the ‘ontological difference,’ science fiction is primarily an ontic discourse, a discourse concerned with beings within the world, whereas fantasy is primarily an ontological one, a discourse concerned with Being itself. What this suggests is that the socio-phenomenological stakes involved in fantasy are more radical than those involved in science fiction. In Adornian terms, science fiction, it could be said, is primarily engaged in the extension of identity thinking, whereas fantasy, through its wilful denial of cognition, points to the ‘messianic moment,’ the necessity of finding some way out of our functional nightmare."

~from rsbakker.wordpress.com/essay-archive/dragons-over-spaceships/

Technically correct, but incredibly obtuse and doesn't clearly refute the idea of democracy as a principle other than maybe some contrarianism about the bourgeois state also being "democratic".

Is this what Bordiga reads like?

In communism, democracy will not exist, as there won't be an abstracted authority above society (a state, whether you call it that or not) to vote on the policies of.
Democracy is unnecessary when society already controls production, and production becomes the production of all of life.

If by "democracy", you mean "involve as many people as possible", then yeah, no shit, you can't have communism without the community, but that isn't what is meant by people, even leftists, when they use the term "democracy".