No conservative scifi geek's bookshelf would be complete without Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, a novel about a dystopian future America full of nasty anti-capitalists who want to feed the poor and crush innovation. Slowly, our industrial capitalist main character realizes that other "atlases" of industry — the rich elites whose businesses make the world go round — are disappearing. It all has to do with this giant motor that turns "atmospheric static electricity" into "kinetic energy." And a secret underground world where all the planet's innovators and capitalists have hidden themselves in order to create a perfect utopia of innovation and individualism. The novel has been a favorite allegory for generations of free market libertarians, and even inspired the videogame Bioshock.

A much more radically conservative scifi novel is The Turner Diaries, written by "Andrew Macdonald," a fictional account from a foot soldier who fought in the white-power revolution in the United States. This is the novel where we first see the term ZOG, for "Zionist occupational government," which is what the revolutionaries in the book call the U.S. government, which is full of blacks and Jews and other terrible people. Written in the 1970s in gritty, disturbingly-engaging prose, the novel tells the story of how a rag-tag cell of soldiers works together with other bands to take over the U.S. government and murder blacks and Jews across the nation to create a white utopia. This is the novel that has inspired many Christian Identity groups and white-power militias in the United States, and a copy was found in the car of Timothy McVeigh, one of the men involved in the 1991 Oklahoma City bombing.

The bestselling Left Behind series, which has also been made into a movie, is science fiction for the Christian right. It's the simple tale of what happens when the Jews and Arabs finally make peace, and then the truly God-loving Christians are raptured up to heaven. Those who are left behind to face Armageddon must find their way toward heaven, or get ready for hell! There's a reason why these books are bestsellers: they're action-packed and intense, and they make an effort to translate present-day politics into a Biblical framework.

Of course there are plenty of right-wing science fiction classics to be found on video too. 1980s cold war paranoia flick Red Dawn tops the list, with its tale of what happens when the Soviets invade a small Colorado town. Unfortunately the Russkies didn't bargain on high school teacher Patrick Swayze and the whole high school football team becoming super-ninjas who can easily defeat them! It was a rah-rah Reagan moment of near-future scifi that might be one of the only examples of right-wing camp.

Then there's the strange Christopher Lambert movie Fortress, about a future where the United States is run by cruel abortionists and environmentalists, who won't let couples have more than one baby. Our hero is trying to flee to Mexico in order to have his second child with his wife. Like Atlas Shrugged, this conservative scifi shows us a liberal dystopia which rugged individuals must escape to be free.

Are these science fiction scenarios really any less compelling than liberal ones? Or are all politically-minded scifi scenarios doomed from the start to be bad fiction because they are attempts to shoehorn plot into philosophy rather than teasing many ideas out of a strong plot?

Star Wars: A New Hope

Tattoine, the remote desert planet where Luke Skywalker is raised by his Aunt and Uncle, is full of nomads and farmers who scrabble out a life among rocks and dunes. The Jawas roam around in caravans, and the Tusken Raiders are dressed in strips of towel and called only by a name (Sand People) that is probably the space version of a well-known US epithet for Arabs. The only "nice" people on the planet appear to be the transplanted (white) humans like Skywalker and Obi Wan. As usual, George Lucas serves up racial stereotypes, likes white people, and doesn't do much else.

Dune

Arakis, the desert planet whose rolling dunes shelter sandworms and a tribe of polygamous insurrectionaries known as the Fremen, is clearly set up as a Middle Eastern country that has been colonized for centuries. Arakis is the only source of "the spice," a substance that makes interplanetary space travel possible and is mined from the sands by giant spice rigs (that look a lot like oil rigs in the films). Not only is the culture in the Dune universe intended to refer to Muslim culture — for instance, a massive war is referred to as a "Jihad" — but the economy of Arakis is similar to the Saudi, Kuwaiti or Iraqi economies. The planet is full of many oppressed tribes, and ruled by a tiny elite class that trades a single natural energy source for wealth and power. What's interesting is that the books side with the Fremen, who are essentially the insurgents bent on overthrowing the wealthy offworlders who want Arakis' spice.

Stargate (the movie)

While the Stargate television series deal with many different worlds, the original film is focused on only one: Abydos, a land of space Egyptians, ruled by an alien named Ra. According to Stargate lore, Ra came to Earth during the Egyptian era to steal slaves for Abydos. So the culture of the desert planet is a direct descendant of early Middle Eastern culture on Earth. Weirdly, it hasn't developed in the centuries since its transplantation, though of course modern Egypt on Earth is far more technologically advanced than ancient Egypt. It's as if the people on Abydos have just been waiting for some white dude to come and rescue them.

Starship Troopers (the movie)

In the first Starship Troopers film, and the book, our Earth soldiers first attempt to mow down the alien bugs on their home planet of Klendathu. It's a desert planet, much like Planet P where the bugs and humans do most of their fighting in the first movie. While there is no direct connection between the culture of the bugs and Middle Eastern cultures, the desert surroundings definitely suggest it. The bugs are the ultimate, dehumanized "enemy," and therefore it's tempting to say they stand in for Iraqis since the films were all made during a period in history when there was tension between Iraq and the United States. Still, it would be just as easy to say the bugs stand in for other "enemies" in desert regions. So the connection in this franchise between a desert planet and the Middle East is weaker than in the previous three, though it's still there. Especially because so much wartime propaganda is about dehumanizing the enemy.

The Years of Rice and Salt

This novel by Kim Stanley Robinson is not set on another planet — instead, it's set on a very different Earth from our own. It's an Earth where the plagues of the middle ages wiped out nearly all of Christian Europe, and where Islam became the dominant religion in the West. So it's not about the Middle East, but instead a brilliant thought-experiment in which what many people think of as "Middle Eastern culture" has been superimposed on what many think of as "Western culture." The results? Muslim feminism, for one thing. And India colonizes Europe rather than the other way around.

What was it in the novel that made Bush change the course of the nation's scientific research, putting the U.S. several years behind Europe and Asia? Apparently Bush adviser Jay Lefkowitz read the President a passage from the novel about genetically-engineered babies being grown in womb factories and Bush got really quiet and upset. He seemed to think there was a direct connection between stem cell research and wholesale government control of future generations' genetic code. What he didn't realize was that the genome hacking in Brave New World is actually done to prevent the need for welfare and other pesky social programs that Bush hates — all the working class people are designed to be strong, stupid, and enjoy manual labor so they never get annoyed by working at McDonalds. And they never demand libraries or healthcare.

Just goes to show that you can write a leftist scifi critique of government authoritarianism, and still wind up inspiring the very authoritarians you hoped to undermine. Maybe Huxley will have the last laugh, though. By retarding our progress in medical science so much, Bush has probably done more to make the U.S. irrelevant to the future than any other leader has. (Except perhaps Reagan, whose military policies were inspired by Star Wars.)

Dystopian Scifi Shapes White House Stem Cell Policy [via Carpetbagger Report]

Famous names: John Carpenter, Rowdy Roddy Piper

Crunchy goodness: 4

Elevator pitch: "It's The Manchurian Candidate meets No Holds Barred!"

Stunt casting: Wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, whose wooden acting is oddly perfect for the now-classic line: "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I'm all out of bubblegum."

Sights you'll never unsee: The final shot of the film: one of the formaldehyde-faced aliens having sex with a topless woman.

Life lesson: If a friend tells you to put on a pair of sunglasses, you'll have to kick each others' asses for five and half minutes if you refuse, so put the glasses on!

John Carpenter's They Live Site Must See by Sherilyn Connelly.