Over on the Fight the Future forum, which discusses stories in the weekly Futures SF column in Nature, we’ve been discussing the latest entry – a somewhat tongue-in-cheek tale by Martin Hayes warning all school leavers against joining the Space Corps. As the Editor of the column, I enjoyed the references to Alien but what resonated most with me were echoes of older SF tales such as Harry Harrison’s Bill The Galactic Hero and Hoe Haldeman’s The Forever War.
The piece is written from a very male perspective, which is fine, so I was irked by a comment from someone too shy to share their identity, which read
All aspiring members of the space corps are male? Come on, Nature, you can do better than this!
To which my reply was, more or less, that it is the job of writers to entertain, not to be constrained by political correctness. I loathe PC in all its forms – it is a discriminatory and unjust tyranny imposed by hypocrites who loudly claim that everyone should have the right to believe what they want, provided that it happens to accord with their own narrow, puritanical views.
Practically, I am not going to write back to an author of a piece like this – nor, indeed, any piece – and say things like ‘yes, OK, it’s great, but lets have some female space-corps members, and make sure we have the requisite quota of people with disabilities and who come from ethnic minorities’.
As an editor I think that such deliberate tampering with pieces to make them look more PC is woefully insincere, and is easily seen as the blatant social engineering it is. Any author who received such an edict would tell me to get lost, and quite right too.
Me? I stand for the sunshine and blue skies of self-expression, and against the dismal fog of political of social censorship.
This has made me so cross that I am going to take the dog
for a very long walk.
Some people clearly don’t deserve the Futures column. I suggest they stick to The Guardian, where they belong.
