Fascism can be attractive.
A golden age of science fiction took place between the late Forties and the Seventies when the new technologies that made readers think they were in the future were atomic weapons and spaceships where everyone could jaunt to strange places and alien civilizations distant and isolated from one another just as had been the case when Gulliver could get on ship and also visit very different kinds of societies and apply an anthropological eye. That period had not yet invented computers and a previous period in “Brave New World”, from the Thirties, had invented test tube babies and mood altering drugs, and the Thirties and before had envisioned a war made destruction of civilization, though the image of plagues were as old as “Exodus” and as current as Poe. Moreover, the post WWII science fiction age carefully distinguished between science fiction, as driven by technology, from science fantasy, which was driven by medievalist sentiments concerning fairies and goblins, that best represented in Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” where the aliens are ghostly specters surrounding the Earth visitors who have colonized Mars.
That postwar Golden Age, however, as is the case in most science fiction, do not only concern themselves with technology. They elaborate how society itself is structured. The most prominent science fiction writer of the time, Issac Asimov, created a galactic history where the people of Earth start with a few dozen human settled planets, known as “the spacers”, and humanity spreads throughout the galaxy, Earth itself long forgotten, and no alien races encountered, humanity centering on a totally urban Emperor led planet, Trantor, which dominates the galaxy, but eventually falls into decline, a speedier renaissance to be gained by an elite of psychohistorians who analyze social trends and will help the galaxy to restore itself. Asimov may have relied on H. G. Wells by borrowing the idea of a council of technologists to save the day but may have only relied on Gibbon to show what an empire would be like. It seems to me that “Star Wars” was an uncredited steal from Asimov.
What is significant about the Asimov galaxy is that it is democratic in that, as is in the case of “Star Wars”, an imperial executive is checked by a legislative council where senators and advisers face one another in complex governmental bureaucracies, including open congressional hearings. And so make the galactic empire generally a progressive one buttressed by technology and reason. There are backward steps as when a figure called “the Mule '' engages in a rampage of destruction, that figure apparently modeled on Hitler, but by and large reason and science prevail. During one story that makes up the novel “Foundation”, the clergy take over spaceships, but they are all engineers and so if they incant over spaceships, they have the advantage of making the spaceships go. So much for superstition, in that religion works when engineers take over. A short story by Asimov portrays how people will be freed from their mortal bodies because their minds will be uploaded into digital memories and eventually, through human modified evolution, into carnate beings or maybe into some kind of Eden with eternal and distinctive souls, never mind the problem of whether recorded data can ever turn into subjective consciousness.
A contemporary of Asimov, Robert Heinlein, shares the new technology of spaceships but takes a very different view on the political structures of government that lie in the future. Starting out as a straight line conservative who think money bag entrepreneurs are the innovators of our time, not government inefficiency and plodding plans, and so maybe a forecast of the rise of Elon Musk, Heinlein starts with a trip to the moon soon after WWII ended and finds the Nazis already had a base there that has to be dispatched. But Heinlein goes more deeply into the Fascist idea of a highly militarized society that prizes violence and obedience to those who know better and are part of a secretive cadre. This view is elaborated best in “Starship Troopers” where a united Earth crosses, perhaps blunders, into a war with an alien race and high school grads take on their various roles in the war effort: some as ordinary soldiers and some as decision makers who take care of their former classmates. A war veteran explains to high school students that citizenship in the society is warranted only through having served in an all volunteer military, for only those have had the responsibility and therefore the wisdom to become leaders. Only that elite can participate in government.
It is to be remembered that “Starship Troopers” is done as a lark, a kind of comedy, in that the heroes win against the unsympathetic very alien aliens, and so Fascism can be given some liberty as a fanciful but coherent proposition. The movie version also treated it as a lark, even adapting uniforms and greatcoats similar to the garb used by Germans during the Third Reich. Also, Heinlien indulged in science fiction novels where he tried out very different political regimes, as if trying to put his imagination to the varieties of the political imagination. In his novel “Double Star'', he imagines a world federation led by a parliamentary system, a prime minister in and out of election, and the nations of the world having adopted the House of Orange as its titular leader. British government can be made to work for the whole world.
Frank Herbert was, to my mind, a later and lesser science figure writer of the time. He was inferior in my mind to Phillip Dick, who imagined alternative history and also time alterations, or even Hal Clement, who imagined the biology of creatures living on worlds with much higher gravity. But Herbert was on to something in his invention of “Dune” where there is a world of desert and is Muslim like in its culture. The story of “Dune” is about a messiah made and become triumphant and where the spirit of that world and Herbert’s enterprise is clearly fascistic, and its themes have been developed by two movies the second of which is popular at present.
The story is a conventional one of an indigenous people who are in a war of liberation led by a person of a different people. It is “Lawrence of Arabia'' that doesn’t do sand as well as David Lean and doesn’t have a star like Peter O’Toole to hold it together. What it does have are the emotions rather than the social structure of Fascism, It is concerned with the glorification of suffering, violence, fear and obedience tied with messianism requiring interminable warfare and a secret society, whether a political party or the SS or, in this case, a sisterhood of prophesiers who inflict great pain so people are shown to be worthy. The same theme of a secret society in a mild way finds itself in “Star Wars”, yoda a benign mystical figure while Darth Vader, a lapsed Jedi, is a malignant one, the grand opposition between Jedi warriors, just like when Whittiker Chambers said that the final battle would be between the Communists and the ex-Communiosts, when Communism was overtaken by centrists like Eisenhower and Liberal Democrats. But Fascism and many other forms of dramatic world confrontations are posed as the conflict between two champions, as happens in “Dune Part Two” although there is no reason for it other than custom. Should FDR and Hitler fight it off in a jousting match?
“Dune: Part Two” doesn’t add any themes or insights or imagery to what was in the original “Dune”. In fact, it seems to soften its impact. Duke Harkonnen, who is the arch villain in both films, doesn't in the second part have the homosexual aura of his fat near nude and boils laden body, just obese and just an allusion to bathing in oil to ease his pain. Paul, the hero, does not have in the rework the incestuous tone with his mother. In the first one, Paul’s mother revives her from his drinking the deadly fluid that makes and shows himself to be a true messiah. In this version, it is a tear from his girlfriend that revives him. For a movie to be seen in Imax, there are too many closeups and not so visual. The worms are less dreadful, mostly indicated by the movements in the sand, than was the case earlier on. and the C.G. I. effects seem cheap and routine in their imaging of flutter helicopters and mass crowds in an arena. No wonder Spielberg shuns C. G. I. Maybe Fascism works best as an idea rather than in its gruesome effects.
Not all science fiction filled with violence is fascistic. The “Terminator” series is a Christian like story about a person from the future who goes back to the present so as to impregnate a woman who will safeguard her child so he can become the one who saves the future. The Mad Max movies are also violent but anarchic rather than fascistic in that the good guys have to battle with bizarre and maniacal people to get their fuel. The true Fascists are those who simplify government as good versus evil, as when Flash Gordon clashes with Ming the Magnificent and where there are puppeteers who control the apparent world as in the Matrix series. Fascism is not a popular American belief in literature except when science fiction spins into it or when it comes up in real politics by another name as when MAGA means following a cult hero wherever it might lead.
The lesson to be taken from Fascist science fiction is that Fascism is enduring because its feelings and structures are appealing. Despite the overwhelming preference for individualism and constitutionalism as engaged by Americans perhaps because of its civic education, at least for as long as that lasted when American history was taught seriously in high school, there has always been a strand towards the strong and who will conquer whatever are the problems of the moment through their iron will, constitutional niceties to be put aside. Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy and Donakd Trump come to mind, people who are outsiders who come to the top because of and in spite of their meanness and vindictiveness. Moreover, there is a taste for becoming obedient to a leader and trafficking with violence as an image of necessity. This is all very different from that other reformer, FDR, who was a patrician whose family went back to Seventeenth Century New York, and spoke with wit and style, hardly the threatening figure a Fascist figure has to be.