Podcasting “Science fiction is a Luddite Literature”

My last pre-op podcast.

Cory Doctorow

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This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, “Science Fiction is a Luddite Literature,” an essay about the historically unsupportable libel that turned “Luddite” into a slur.

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

Far from rejecting technology out of some reactionary fear, the Luddites instead demanded a renegotiation of the social relations governing that the new textile machines of the industrial revolution. Rather than have these machines displace workers and pad their bosses’ profits, the Luddites demanded higher wages, less work, and cheaper cloth.

Mill owners were okay with cheap cloth, but the rest of it was out. The new machines required less esoteric knowledge, meaning owners could replace their workers more readily, and they used this to drive down wages and subject workers to lethal risk from the new machines.

As I write in the column, a Martian staring down at the Earth through a telescope couldn’t tell you why the benefits of textile machines — bought with profits wrung from weavers’ labor — should accrue to factory owners and not factory workers. The act of challenging that arrangement is fundamentally science-fictional — a demand to go…

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