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HORSE_SPACE

                                             March 22, 2016

                                 (Posted to the
                                  Charles Stross blog,
                                  antipope.org.)


  Okay, back to basics, let's talk about horse opera.

  Ann-Marie Hendrickson (on WBAI's now long-gone late-night
  anarchist talk show "The Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade") had
  recently discovered Gene Autry films, and was surprised by how
  left-wing their central premises were (think: big business
  wants railroad right-of-way and hires villains to drive off
  farmers). She compared this to the more right-wing style of the
  typical John Wayne film, and theorized that one of the reasons
  Westerns declined in popularity was that they had lost touch
  with their populist roots.

  E.E. Smith is more in line with the older tradition,
  where in "First Lensman" there are evil corporations
  behind the bad guys (and behind them are aliens, but
  in the lensmen stories, there are aliens behind
  everyone).

  The main action at the end of "First
  Lensman" involves winning an election
  (for North American President, as I         Heteromeles@305: "In any case,
  remember it, bye-bye Mexico/Canada).        if space opera has a strongly
  A lensman uses his lens as a campaign       romantic streak, one of the
  device, persuading voters via               challenges in writing the story
  telepathic communion, which it is           is to make democratic politics
  asserted can not be used to lie.  The       romantic."
  bad guys spread the word that the
  lens is actually a hypnotism device,        http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/03/towards-a-taxonomy-of-cliches-.html
  which actually is not a bad thing to
  be afraid of.  How would you know
  that they're not just brainwashing
  everyone?

  I throw all this out to any Scottish socialist SF writers in
  the audience, who might find some small inspiration here.

    "Triplanetary" and "First Lensman" are up on
    the gutenberg and librivox sites these days.

    And you're not really hip until you see "The
    Phantom Empire" (1935), Gene Autry's science
    fiction cowboy epic:

       https://archive.org/details/phantom_empire_chapter_1


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