SF Signal a demandé à plusieurs écrivains leur avis sur la politique et les réactions qu'elle pourrait provoquer chez les écrivains de SF... et dans leurs textes. 
Voici la réponse de Peter Watts : 

Citation:

Let’s start with how they do respond to the politics of their time. The easiest answer is to invoke John Clute’s concept of the “real year” of a novel — the idea that regardless of the time in which the story is explicitly set, its subtextual issues and fears (politics included) will be more reflective of those that were current when the novel was written. There’s certainly some truth to this — Neuromancer and The Handmaid’s Tale, for example, are both pretty clearly reflective of eighties-era political anxieties (which is not to say that those anxieties have necessarily stale-dated in the meantime). But it also implies a lack of authorial foresight, an inability to look beyond the automobile to predict the traffic jam. This can be a feature rather than a bug, at least in cases where the purpose of the story is to provide a metaphor for contemporary society or to lay out a cautionary if this goes on scenario. It can be a feature and a bug if the story is inhabited by sock puppets through whom the author simply funnels her own political beliefs (this is probably inevitable to some degree given that authors are all still human at the time of this writing) (except for the authors of Harlequin romances, of course) (and maybe the authors of Star Trek novelizations).  As to how we should reflect conventional politics, I have no clue. Conventional North American politics freak me right out. The only way I could even attempt to get a grasp on them would be to frame them anthropologically — looking past the superficial behaviors to the neuroeconomics, game theory, and parasite-host interactions that lie beneath. Because, really: the things that most front line politicos are saying on this continent, these days — what they evidently have to say, if they want to get elected — make no fucking sense whatsoever. As Harvard physicist Lisa Randall has pointed out, politicians who are perfectly comfortable taking about God and Religion shy away from questions about Science like Rick Santorum fleeing a gay bar.  I mean, seriously. I’ve got a bit of a reputation for envisioning whacked-out dystopian futures rife with sociopaths and neuroengineered freaks, but none of those characters ever took their marching orders from an invisible homophobic sky fairy and then boasted about it as though it were some badge of honor instead of a symptom of pathology. None of them would be brazen or stupid enough to flagrantly excoriate positions they’d enthusiastically endorsed mere months before. None of them would deny the most basic principles of biology while bragging about their ignorance of science. Hell, not one of my twisted protagonists even started a war of convenience to line the pockets of their friends in the oil industry. And if any of my characters did do anything like that, they wouldn’t get away with it; they’d be widely called out and ridiculed, because I just can’t bring myself to populate my worlds with complete idiots. I guess that’s why they call it fiction.  Politics on this continent are fucking insane.  This is not to say that they’re incomprehensible. We know how people can believe six mutually contradictory things before breakfast. We’ve identified Confirmation Bias and Pareidolia, we’ve researched the neurology and natural history of religious belief. We know how people who are utterly sane when it comes to counting calories or running heavy machinery can become batshit crazy when it comes to abortion or gay marriage or spirits in the sky, and we understand how Bambi syndrome and risk-aversion algorithms inspire people to fall in behind the well-coiffed sociopathic douchebags who so often seem to call the shots. As R. Scott Bakker points out, “The brain is … far more interested in sorting claims according to social criteria rather than evaluating them on their independent merits.”  But that’s not politics. Politics is pure epiphenomenon, the scum on the surface of a stagnant swamp. As a standalone entity, divorced from its roots, it makes no sense at all. Science fiction — or at least, the kind of science fiction I can wrap my head around — has to make sense. The only way to make sense of politics is to dig down and study the biology underneath.  So maybe that’s your answer. Maybe science fiction shouldn’t take that scum on face value. Maybe we should just skim it away, and pay more attention to the nitrates and phosphates underneath.

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