I need to get this straight because there are some idiots who unironically believe this shit:

The science-fiction genre was not created by Marxists or socialists. Sure, communists infiltrated sci-fi publishers back in the 1930s and rejected anything that went against their views, but this was to get fans to think that a communist or socialist revolution was the only way to get the sci-fi future they wanted. However, the genre dates back to the 1600s (nearly 200 years before Karl Marx was even born) with stories like The Other World, New Atlantis, and The Blazing World. Even after the commie infiltration of sci-fi publishing houses, science fiction stories that were clearly not Marxist or socialist were still written and published such as Atlas Shrugged.

I only bring this up because I see some idiot RWers who judge the whole genre based on the themes of Star Trek and think that sci-fi is nothing more than promoting Fully Automated Gay Space Communism when that was never the intended purpose.

@xianc78 nobody cares about proto non-sci-fi by randoms

@xianc78 reminds me of the RWers saying cyberpunk is all about promoting transgenderism/transhumanism. zero clue what they're talking about.

Herbert suffers from an under-recognized problem when historically-ignorant readers read “science fiction” decades or centuries after it was written: they mistake science for fiction—where it was simply forgotten science.

When the science in SF survives the passage of time, we regard it as simply ordinary science or as an insightful prediction of the future; when it turns out to be wrong, we may write it off as fiction. This leads to a bizarre insistence on treating scientific content as purely literary, shoehorning it into some literary framework like Freudianism or feminism—which is about as likely to yield genuine critical insight into classic SF as a read of Moby-Dick by someone determined to remain ignorant of what a ‘whale’ is. ...
...
Herbert made use of psi (still taken seriously at the time), extrapolation from the use of pheromones in insects to humans (though pheromones don’t even affect sexual behavior), various wooly ideas about transgenerational memory (never passed from woo to reality—sorry, “epigenetics” ain’t it either), Walter’s theory of warfare (crankery), and multilevel group selection (possibly under highly limited circumstances, the extent of which is still debated), Californian Human Potential Movement beliefs about trainability of raw human abilities exemplified by Dianetics etc (a profound disappointment)… As they are presented as part of worldbuilding, it’s easy to simply accept them as fiction, no more intended as science than manticores.

This works fine for Dune 56+ years later, because they are fun, and aren’t the focus. ... In contrast, Herbert’s Destination: Void, which is devoid of interesting plot or characters, and is a long author-tract about his idiosyncratic interpretations of early cybernetics & speculation about AI, is unreadable today.

— https://gwern.net/dune-genetics

@merchantHelios Combining ancient technology with space travel does make an interesting setting.