Ghost of a flea

You have to love Difilippo's claim that Reagan has been "thoroughly discredited". Only among those who never granted him credit in the first place, Paul!

It's all too easy to cry fascism. It was one of the last *big* things, and things are now so confusing... it's easy to go back and reference it. Now, it's no secret that nostalgic imperialists like Mosley, Powell and AK Chesterton kept fascism going into the postwar era. Perhaps leftists of the time saw that reflected in the Thatcher government, though I think that is a terrible exaggeration, to say that of Thatcher.

And science fiction serves to heighten facets of the society. We ARE living in the cyberpunk future written about in those books, and you can certainly see it. Britain and Europe seem to be going through quite a revival of this right-wing thuggery at the moment. Though compared to the 70s and 80s, I don't know, haven't really read up.

I agree we are living in something like the future those authors were describing. What bothers me is tribal party loyalty of any kind and, worse yet, an intellectual snobbery with no enemies on the left.

The UK is a surveillance society gone mad but most of the blame for what has transpired falls on New Labour, the technocracy for which I voted and for which I, uhh, laboured. I expect if there had been a Conservative government in place over the last fifteen years we would have seen much the same developments. But I expect hip sf authors would have been far more willing to criticize.

Yeah, you're probably right about that. Party loyalty is one of the most overrated virtues, if it is a virtue.

Some thoughts on the Eclipse trilogy -- I haven't read it, so what I'm writing is a bit moot -- I believe it takes place after a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. I've been interested in what the political ramifications of such a thing would have looked like. Orwell famously explored a postwar politics that was basically fascist or authoritarian communist. There's this idea that instead of the classic end of the world scenario, you see, the war would just keep going with really horrible consequences for the people living in the remaining NATO countries, this turn toward something resembling fascism. I think it was Robert Paxton, but I might be wrong about this, who pointed out that fascism tends to come about when conservatives side with it out of fear of a push from the Left: clerical authorities or the military aristocracy in certain countries. Obviously, Thatcherite conservatives were not fascists by any means, but given the right pressures like, say, a nuclear world war, then it may be something worth exploring in a work of speculative fiction. Just saying.