I’ve been kicking around a thought lately that when it comes to SFF we could probably bypass some of the perennial political vs. apolitical vs. everything-is-political-apolitical-storytelling-doesn’t-exist by instead formulating a spectrum from politically coherent to politically incoherent
Essentially, politically coherent works are works where the political message of the story is supported by all (or at least most) of the major story elements, and a politically incoherent work is a story where the political messages of different elements are seemingly all shooting off on different vectors.
The nice thing about this is it can bypass authorial intent (and the discussion of whether intent matters). This is about the text.
Like, politically incoherent works that had no authorial thought behind them are a dime a dozen of course, and politically coherent works that clearly had a lot of authorial thought are if not equally common than at least easy to spot. But there are also plenty of works that are politically coherent without the author intending them that way—like, whatever faults there are with Project Hail Mary, the overall opinion the book has about the nature of humanity & of science is consistent throughout. Likewise there are stories where the authors clearly meant a coherent political point and totally wiffed it. (The works @specialagentartemis has collectively termed “cozy colonialism” come to mind)
So there’s a utility in replacing the question “is this story political?” (Yes, always, but if the answer is always yes the question becomes kinda useless) with “Is this story politically coherent?” Because a yes or no there will tell a prospective reader something about what to expect.
