This explains a lot, actually

[tomscud]

John Crowley, here:
In general I think novelists should not speak about politics, and if they speak about them we should resist listening. These are people accustomed to creating imaginary worlds and making them go as they like, which can make their opinions tend to the fascistic, even their gentle-hippie or wise-crone opinions. Autocratic maybe

Comments

[randwolf]

Affinity, hell. The man's a Trotskyite.

[mmcirvin]

Physicists who are science-fiction writers sometimes become fond of a kind of SF physics in which one reasons backward from cool effects to the requisite laws. It can cause them to have odd ideas about what is plausible.

[mmcirvin]

Also I think this is a reason why I am not a fiction writer. I had fancies of being one, but the stories I think of now are very polemical, with axes to grind; yet I tire of reading such stories since the author always stacks the deck. I think I need to get even older and get past that, or not do fiction.

[tomscud]

I somehow have no head whatsoever for plot; I can come up with amusing settings and characters, but I can't make anything actually HAPPEN.

[randwolf]

Obviously you need one of these.

[randwolf]

And yet novelists have often been politically influential. Think of Solzhenitzn and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.