Neal Asher has a new book out called Dark Diamond. The dedication page in it is quite frankly pretty horrifying.
Five years ago, I watched the two Falcon Heavy side boosters come into land at Cape Canaveral Space Force Base. Honestly, it was like something in a game animation and seemingly too perfect to be believable. Others, I’ve seen landing on drone ships with names taken from lain M. Banks’ Culture books. Just recently, I saw a huge booster for the Starship come down to be caught between two metal arms - y’know, they caught something the size of a skyscraper like a dropping stick - and that was an astounding feat of engineering. But these are not in isolation, since SpaceX, as of last month, has launched over a hundred rockets in 2024.
Meanwhile, the guy who brought this about, the guy who is aiming to make humanity multi-planetary by putting us on Mars, has a few other projects on the go, like building electric cars, burrowing tunnels under cities, putting up a satellite internet system and, perhaps the most important of them all, preventing the totalitarians of our world from killing free speech.
So thank you, Elon Musk, for bringing to reality, right before my eyes, those things I read and dreamed about as a teenager.
That… is a REALLY unfortunate, given Musk’s apparent aspirations to be a Culture-level Bad Guy™. It’s like Asher’s paid absolutely zero attention to the fact that the Starlink is considered pollution on a massive scale, from an astronomy perspective and numerous environmental aspects. And that Elon’s Boring Company is widely acknowledged to have been a ploy to stop Cali from approving light rail projects. And that his purchase of Twitter was in fact a splurge to destroy a free speech platform and bend it to be another disinformation platform instead. Yuck.
I should add that while I personally don’t really enjoy Asher’s books all that much to begin with, I was utterly unaware of his politics until now. I will strongly recommend against him going forward, much like I do with Orson Scott Card, despite an extreme fondness for some of Card’s earlier works.
Do you guys worry much about the politics of the authors you enjoy, or is it more of a me thing?
Sometimes it takes a while for people to come around that their heros might not be their heros anymore. I was a huge Musk fan for a long time, but sometime during Trump’s campaign I finally flipped. I’m convinced that Musk has changed a lot from the Musk of ten or fifteen years ago, where he was dreaming of utopias. Too much money, power, drugs and twitter and he is barely hardly recognizable as the person who pounded the table about Martian colonization in the early, scrappy SpaceX days. But it’s very possible I had the blinders on because I was a space fan.
Like imagine a world where he was in the reddit echo chamber rather than the Twitter echo chamber… Maybe things go differently and he become Banksian rather than Heinleinian.
I also suspect Asher will come around. That dedication was probably written before Trump’s campaign. At some point does he realize that Musk is pro-authoritarian?
It is entirely possible for smart people to rationalize dumb positions forever.
I find increasingly that sci-fi and fantasy authors often have takes on the real world that are diametrically opposed to their writings and the writings of the people they credit as inspirations. I got the ick from Neal Asher a couple of years back and while I like his fiction I am appalled by his takes on the world we live in.
My go to example has been Richard K Morgans shitty takes on trans subjects despite writing a series of books that explicitly view bodies and mentalities as entirely distinct. How someone could write about a male conciousness in a female body and not get that there can be an intrinsic gender identity which doesn’t match external presentation boggles my mind. It would be like finding out Iain Banks was a hardcore fascist (thankfully all I have ever heard about him says his personal ideals were pretty closely aligned with the tone and content of his writings.)
Oof, I didn’t realize that about Morgan either. That is very disappointing, and as you say, really at odds with the way he writes about the experience in his books.
Oh but if he read my comment he would no doubt say that he doesn’t have a problem with trans people **BUT… ** they just shouldn’t be allowed to use bathrooms, you know, to protect the women.
And you just know that if he is willing to engage with and parrot that stupid culture war talking point in public then his private views are worse.
