In the excerpt below, the character Shevek talks with his hosts on the planet Urras. The twin planets Urras and Anarres have had no communication with each other for more than a century, since the Urrasti insurrectionists were exiled to Anarres. Shevek is the first visitor from Anarres since the exile.

Shevek felt extremely uncomfortable. He got up and went over to the windows. “Your world is very beautiful,” he said. “I wish I could see more. While I must stay inside, will you give me books?”

“Of course, sir! What sort?”

“History, pictures, stories, anything. Maybe they should be books for children. You see, I know very little. We learn about Urras, but mostly about Odo’s times. Before that was eight and one half thousand years! And then since the Settlement of Anarres is a century and a half; since the last ship brought the last settlers—ignorance. We ignore you; you ignore us. You are our history. We are perhaps your future. I want to learn, not to ignore. It is the reason I came. We must know each other. We are not primitive men. Our morality is no longer tribal, it cannot be. Such ignorance is a wrong, from which wrong will arise. So I come to learn.”

That says rather succinctly what I was trying to convey about feeling culturally challenged.

Somehow, I have nothing more to say on the matter right now.

But today I found another person, Shelley the Republican, who finally understands what SF is about.

If you are not familiar with the genre, do not worry: Very little has changed since it was invented 50 years ago by Isaac Asimov and L. Ron Hubbard. These two men created the first “Scifi” (pronounced see-fee) books as a crazy of bet: They dared each other to concoct the most preposterous nonsense in order to see if American kids would buy it

[...]

These outlandish tales are often full of vivid, perverse sexual imagery, violence or excessive cussing. The stories are frequently amoral, with protagonists rewarded for their sinful behavior. Furthermore when God is mentioned, it is usually to take his Holy name in vain. The end-result is a shameful and grotesque fantasy nightmare. It’s more horrific than anything that could come form Hollywood’s sick imagination.

If only this were the full extent of the sci-fi problem: There are now hundreds of web-sites offering readers a quick fix of fantasy. As with drug pushers the first hit is always free, which is why you can find authors offering hundreds of short-stories and even entire novels available as a free download. This is clearly an incentive to coerce your kids into buying-into their degrading fantasies.

Man, talk about hitting the nail on the head. And I love the burn about how SF authors can never get published, so they just Creative Commons their work. Ouch.

Picture from the article. I don’t know whether it’s fair to label this dude an SF fan, given that he’s dressed as a videogame character, but I suppose some leniency should be allowed, since the author is a self-professed Republican. They aren’t exactly champions of cultural know-how.