Got any recommendations for some science fiction short novels that directly or indirectly portray philosophies like...

Got any recommendations for some science fiction short novels that directly or indirectly portray philosophies like Nationalism, National Socialism, Fascism et cetera under a positive light?

Bonus points if the novels were written before or during WWII, and especially if they were written by an author who had first-hand experience with the various Nationalist nations and parties in Europe during that time.

Other urls found in this thread:

indiewire.com/2016/11/paul-verhoeven-slams-starship-troopers-remake-fascist-update-perfect-trump-presidency-1201747155/
7chan.org/lit/src/Starship_Troopers_-_Robert_Heinlein.pdf
newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2012/08/slavoj-žižek-politics-batman
bigtallwords.com/2015/04/27/the-fascist-we-deserve-the-authoritarian-ideology-of-christopher-nolans-dark-knight-trilogy/
youtube.com/watch?v=XvAsR4O4W0w
twitter.com/AnonBabble

>Martin Heidegger (the second Heidegger)
>Julius Evola (!)
>Giovanni Gentile
>Johann Fichte
>Friedrich Nietzsche
>Plato
>Aristotle

I just read you said science ficion, but fuck off you're getting this list anyway
All scifi writers are libshits anyway

Well, not really what I was looking for, and I'm already familiar with the work of those people, but thanks anyways.

>All scifi writers are libshits anyway
Not wrong, but there are a few exceptions. Robert Heinlein comes to mind, as an example.

What I do is I side with the bad guys, and rejoice in the unbiased descriptions of society or the temporary success of the evil ones

posting the obvious one

Never read the book, is it good? Better or worse than the movie?

it's solid military SF. Heinlein doesn't beat you over the head with his politics Rand-style, and he doesn't play up the grimdark like 40k.

>Major Reid paused to touch the face of an old-fashioned watch, "reading" its hands. "The period is almost over and we have yet to determine the moral reason for our success in governing ourselves. Now continued success isnever a matter of chance. Bear in mind that this is science, not wishful thinking; the universe is what itis , not what we want it to be. To vote is to wield authority; it is the supreme authority from which all other authority derives — such as mine to make your lives miserable once a day.Force, if you will! — the franchise is force, naked and raw, the Power of the Rods and the Ax. Whether it is exerted by ten men or by ten billion, political authority isforce ."

>"But this universe consists of paired dualities. What is the converse of authority? Mr. Rico."

>He had picked one I could answer.

>"Responsibility, sir."

>"Applause. Both for practical reasons and for mathematically verifiable moral reasons, authority and responsibility must be equal — else a balancing takes place as surely as current ‘flows between points of unequal potential. To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy. The unlimited democracies were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority... other than through the tragic logic of history. The unique ‘poll tax’ that we must pay was unheard of. No attempt was made to determine whether a voter was socially responsible to the extent of his literally unlimited authority. If he voted the impossible, the disastrous possible happened instead — and responsibility was then forced on him willy-nilly and destroyed both him and his foundationless temple."

>"Superficially, our system is only slightly different; we have democracy unlimited by race, color, creed, birth, wealth, sex, or conviction, and anyone may win sovereign power by a usually short and not too arduous term of service — nothing more than a light workout to our cave-man ancestors. But that slight difference is one between a system that works, since it is constructed to match the facts, and one that is inherently unstable. Since sovereign franchise is the ultimate in human authority, we insure that all who wield it accept the ultimate in social responsibility — we require each person who wishes to exert control over the state to wager his own life — and lose it, if need be — to save the life of the state. The maximum responsibility a human can accept is thus equated to the ultimate authority a human can exert. Yin and yang, perfect and equal."

(cont'd)

Pounded in the Butt by the Third Reich

I don't know if the above qualifies for "not beating you over the head" but to me it just reads like a necessary scene and component of the plot, not ideology or whatever.

Just my two cents.

As for the film, well...it's probably due for a remake. Verhoeven basically made it as satire (as he did with Robocop) and that played up the nationalistic elements almost to a kind of kitsch. I suppose if you had a director who was more sympathetic to H's sensibilities it would have just been more straightforward and aesthetic. But in 1997 - and maybe still today - making it too grim might rub people the wrong way. I would like to see a remake tho. Verhoeven has already begun calling it fascist...ah, culture.

indiewire.com/2016/11/paul-verhoeven-slams-starship-troopers-remake-fascist-update-perfect-trump-presidency-1201747155/

Here's the book too. Love the cover!

7chan.org/lit/src/Starship_Troopers_-_Robert_Heinlein.pdf

Making it fascistic instead of parodic might make it TOO dignified and tragical, though - just look at how many people like WH40K.

yeah, that's it, exactly. It's sort of like how Bond films - maybe Batman films also - are made, they're a reflection of the current status quo, the cultural mood/zeitgeist. Back when people used to say that Bond was a crypto-fascist gangster, but I think that was because it was the 60s/70s. Roger Moore (RIP) was a goofier bond for a goofier era, Dalton was a cold Bond for a colder era, Craig Bond is a kind of tired Bond for a tired era...

Batman too has gone through these motions. Original Adam West Batman is goofy, Burton Batman is...well, something, Schumacher Batman is campy, Nolan Batman is *just* there enough to bother Zizek, and then you have the IMHO underrated sweaty/paranoid/fascist Affleck Batman who actually was a lot more interesting than he was given credit for. Frank Miller's politics are more on the nose and right-wing than Heinlein's are, to the point where he goes beyond the boundaries of taste, I think.

Admittedly I probably spend a little too much time thinking about this. Super-interesting stuff tho, I find. Anyways, you're totally right: if you frame Starship Troopers like it's Dunkirk or the Somme you are definitely going to be prompting more than you may want do as a director.

Sorry, got so excited musing on that stuff that I forgot to include the more apropos 40K-related pic in there too. I'm sure you've seen this before tho.

"LARPing ourselves out of the grim darkness of the 21st Millennium, and into for some reason an even more grim darkness, because, uh...well, we don't know, exactly, but it definitely has something to do with the fact that we want to smash aliens because otherwise we are going to drive ourselves insane amidst all this consumerist abundance."

What the fuck are you talking about?

>Nolan Batman is *just* there enough to bother Zizek
Does he say anything about Nolan's Batman? That'd be hilarious

He does. I thought his text on the film was in Event, but apparently not. Anyways:

>…is Bane not Dent brought to extreme, to its self-negation? Dent who draws the conclusion that the system itself is unjust, so that in order to effectively fight injustice one has to turn directly against the system and destroy it? And, as part of the same move, Dent who loses last inhibitions and is ready to use all murderous brutality to achieve this goal? The rise of such a figure changes the entire constellation: for all participants, Batman included, morality is relativized, it becomes a matter of convenience, something determined by circumstances: it’s open class warfare, everything is permitted to defend the system when we are dealing not just with mad gangsters but with a popular uprising

>The trilogy of Batman films follows an internal logic. In Batman Begins, the hero remains within the constraints of a liberal order: the system can be defended with morally acceptable methods. The Dark Knight is, in effect, a new version of two John Ford western classics, Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which show how, to civilise the Wild West, one has to “print the legend” and ignore the truth. They show, in short, how our civilisation has to be grounded in a lie – one has to break the rules in order to defend the system.

>The prospect of the Occupy Wall Street movement taking power and establishing a people’s democracy on the island of Manhattan is so patently absurd, so utterly unrealistic, that one cannot avoid asking the following question – why does a Hollywood blockbuster dream about it? Why does it evoke this spectre? Why does it even fantasise about OWS exploding into a violent takeover? The obvious answer – that it does so to taint OWS with the accusation that it harbours a terrorist or totalitarian potential – is not enough to account for the strange attraction exerted by the prospect of “people power”. No wonder the proper functioning of this power remains blank, absent; no details are given about how the people power functions or what the mobilised people are doing. Bane tells the people they can do what they want – he is not imposing his own order on them. This is why external critique of the film (claiming that its depiction of OWS is a ridiculous caricature) is not enough. The critique has to be immanent; it has to locate inside the film a multitude of signs that point towards the authentic event.

newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2012/08/slavoj-žižek-politics-batman

More in a similar vein here.

bigtallwords.com/2015/04/27/the-fascist-we-deserve-the-authoritarian-ideology-of-christopher-nolans-dark-knight-trilogy/

Great

bump

You might want to check this one out OP.

It is neither fascistic, nationalist or national-socialist though. It's Just tells you that hierarchy exists, and that you have to live within it, without becoming a part of it.

Jünger went full stirnerite with Eumeswil. His Anarch is an elaboration of Stirner's Unique One.

Isn't this exactly what W40K is supposed to be?

Also this would be much easier if OP had asked for fantasy instead of science fiction.

Recommend me fascist fantasy pls

Sure. One small caveat, tho: *taste.*

LotR is hands down the best of the bunch. Everything that you could call "traditional" is there, and that's as good as it gets. The more on-the-nose you want your politics the worse and uglier and more stupid it becomes. Go back and read LotR.

Look at Frank Miller. Batman is awesome. Holy Terror sucks. The Spartans are rad; 300 is radically cheesy. Decline of the West is awesome; Imperium is brainless pablum. Heinlein was right-wing; he wasn't so right-wing as to make the Troopers fight anything other than bugs.

youtube.com/watch?v=XvAsR4O4W0w

Bond is sexy and charming, and Conan is god-tier pulp. Neither of those guys were explicitly fascist in their politics, they just used art to walk the line. Same with the Nolan/Miller Batman films. Even Tintin is a product of his times. Lovecraft gets away with racism because he's brilliantly inventive. It helps to be a genius like that.

In all of these cases, the effect works because the darker aspects of human nature are concealed, rather than made graphically explicit: and that is charisma, and that is the essence of a cool protagonist. And again, the authors who were writing this had considerable stylistic powers. The mystery of fantasy lies in exactly that idea of sublimation, just as the crudity of ideology requires the author to Spell Things Out Really Clearly As If We Couldn't See It.

Hence, the Sword of Truth - more objectivist than fascist, but close enough at times - is a spectacularly bad series, and it's another example of what happens when fantasy is wielded to make political points and the author is not a stone-cold literary genius.

tl;dr read Tolkien again and remember that the #1 novel of the 20C had everything you're looking for and more.

I've read LoTR many times...thanks for the other suggestions.

The Iron Dream.

>Warhammer 40k
I never understood, what is this? I understand it began as some miniature game, and they made a movie too
Is it a novel as well?

It's a series of a lot of different media that are set in the same universe.

Nazi Literature in America by Bolano has a section for American Fascist Sci-Fi Authors

A comet strike forces all of the shitty LA gangs to turn into an army of cannibal niggers bent on destroying civilization. A band of white heroes band together to destroy them.

Actually discussed this book at a table at a wedding. One guy had read it, and asked if it "wasnt that book where african americans are portrayed as evil cannibals?

Ok, and what was user referring to? A novel?

I guess he was referring to the Imperium within the universe which most of the stories are regarding some aspect of.

Lol and is it a good read or just ironically so?

I'm that user and is right.

There isn't really a sort of canon 40K novel, it's just that they take a mashup of different pulp/SF sources - Herbert, Moorcock, Lovecraft, et al - and kind of experiment with the aesthetic. It's more a satire of fascism now than before, when the aesthetic was much more gritty. As the series has become more successful it's sort of coalesced into its own thing - imho one of the great spec-fiction settings ever made.

Plus there don't seem to be as many artists on par with John Blanche to make it something approximating legit Veeky Forums stuff. Kind of like when M:TG abandoned the anything-goes art style and Coleridge quotes in its flavour text and developed its own in-house art style.

Where should I start if I were to get into the W40K universe?

>>Veeky Forums.

I managed to fuck up the link but I don't want to waste those trips. Polite sage for samefagging.

There are other anons around here more into 40K than I am, so for a definitive reading list and such you might want to consult Veeky Forums.

The consensus best author is Abnett. Eisenhorn is pretty good and very atmospheric, Ravenor too. I enjoyed the Gaunt's Ghosts books that I read; basically everything he writes is at least above-average to good to great in terms of the lore.

Once you leave Abnett-land the works are of varying quality. People seem to like Dembski-Bowden's work, he does the grimdark stuff well. Graham McNeill is another one of their major-ish authors but he's pretty much standard pulp. If I were you I would just read Abnett stuff. ADB is probably better at handling the Spess Mahreen stuff that is so central to the appeal of the world, Abnett's better for a more subtle and nuanced psychological perspective of that world.

You might read some of the source material stuff too, such as Dune or Moorcock (Hawkmoon, for instance, where the Emperor of Granbretan is a clear influence). Unrelated, but for Dark Empire stuff Gloriana is really good too. Von Bek is probably my favorite MM story: battle-scarred Thirty Years' War mercenary winds up serving Satan.

Finally, though also unrelated, if you're looking for a really novel take on a decaying kingdom, Gormenghast. No space marines or orcs there but it's definitely high quality weird fantasy. For what it's worth.

What I'm really after is still novels that portray fascism in a good light
Nice trips