If you are curious, I’m one of the folks who answered SF Signal’s MIND MELD this week.
This week’s Mind Meld was influenced by a post on Lou Anders’ blog entitled Science Fiction Belongs to the World. In it, questions are raised about stories that espouse a viewpoint that is opposed to one(s) the reader holds.
Q: As a reader, can you enjoy a story that is pushing an opposed viewpoint from one that you hold (religion/politics)? If the author is prone to holding, and writing about, views opposed to yours, can you enjoy their works or do you stop reading them?
Unless it’s a political tract, I generally enjoy reading even if it’s written by people who hold different viewpoints than I hold. I guess that my prime example is Heinlein, through his works I was led to other authors- I love his fiction, it’s what I grew up on, it gave me the sense of wonder that I hold about the future….but, I have triplets who have autism. If I lived in one of “his” universes, my kids would just be considered a burden, or valued for “talents” that they may or may not have- at the very least they sure wouldn’t get what they need from one of his “societies” (fortunately, I’m Canadian) I think that his favourite word for people with challenges like my kids have is “defective”. But I still love him, and re-read a lot of his things every 5 years or so.
I find that it’s the same with a lot of science fiction that I read- when I mentally run over in my head my probable “top 10” authors, I probably disagree philosophically and politically with at least half of them.
And to me, that’s one of the things that I love about reading. Whether it’s SF, non-fiction, mainstream, “Canadian”, history, poetry…whatever- I can always learn something new. And I’ve found that more often than not, when I read and enjoy an author’s stories, it most likely at least gives me a bit of extra empathy to understand a different point of view as well as introducing me to other authors who will most likely also stretch my mind in ways that it’s not accustomed to.
I usually find myself interested in a different view point. I only ever read sf/fantasy, as I like to think it ‘escapist’ fiction. I have already suspended belief as soon as I cracked the book, and I really try and lose myself in the work. (one of the reasons short stories are tough for me, I tend to find them jarring when they end so quickly) So, if I can accept FTL or spells, then I have no problem accepting that I could be wrong about a political or social view. Of course, when the books finished, there is a patina of ‘fantasy’ over everything for a while, and I think, huh…. it would be weird if the world *really* worked like that. And then I get back to life.