Review of “Starship Stormtroopers” (1978)
Michael Moorcock (writer).
Read in 2026.
Political tendencies in fantasy and science fiction.
Next time you pick up a Heinlein book think of the author as looking a bit like General Eisenhower or, if that image isn’t immediate enough, some chap in early middleage, good-looking in a slightly soft way, with silver at the temples, a blue tie, a sober three-pieced suit, telling you with a quiet smile that Margaret Thatcher cares for individualism and opportunity above all things, as passionately in her way as you do in yours. And then you might have some idea of what you’re actually about to read.
Moorcock assumes—instead of explaining—that a lack of conventional verisimilitude is politically irrelevant but has a particular power to shut down critical thinking, which makes for seductive propaganda. It’s an important point, but he does not take it anywhere profound.
Consider Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy (1957). Although its politics are not my own, I can still enjoy it for its ideas, including even its cleverness as deliberately unrealistic political propaganda for some causes I don’t agree with. I don’t see how you could understand it at all without being able to read it politically, since it is about a businessman with a political agenda. Compare John Brunner who is one of Moorcock’s recommendations. It seems to me that Brunner is spectacular—and therefore seductive—in much the same way as Heinlein. The fact that both wrote political fiction must either disqualify both as art regardless of faction, or else disqualify neither. Similarly, the absence of seduction in the more surreal and abstruse work of Maurice Richardson is not as strong a recommendation as Moorcock seems to think. His image of the Thatcherite in a three-piece suit is not helpful to interpretation.
References here: Starship Troopers (1997).