Over the last few years, though certainly not only those years, there’s been a marked debate about politics in the SF/Fantasy/Horror genre. It is understandable people are passionate about what they believe in and the is reflected in their genre tastes and their politics. In the midst of this you can often hear the plea to please just make good stuff and leave the politics out of the story.

While I am sympathetic to that viewpoint it is a futile. Politics is baked into the creation of any art and doubly so where you consider stories that fall into the SF/Fantasy/Horror genre. Politics is about social conflict and how it is resolved. When someone crafts a new story their engage in world-building, and that entails much more than the placement of rivers, forests, mountains, and mythological backgrounds. When as an author you create a story you draw upon your understanding of how the world works, what makes people and cultures tick, and those ideas are usually the core concepts in your political views. It is not more possible to remove political viewpoints from a piece than it is to remove the concepts of what is right and what is wrong.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not talking about soap-boxing where the author often creates straw-men to knock down and prove the validity if their cherished ideals. The blatantly political, written to score points is certainly an obviously political piece and they can be good and they can be terrible, but their existence, glaring and garish, does not eradicate the political in every other piece.

Like bias the political is always there and like bias the best course is not to pretend that it doesn’t exist in a false quest of objectivity, but to seek it out, recognize it, and manage it.

Be aware of the underlying assumptions about people, about governments, and about reality that inform your world building. This is not an easy process and like the quest for perfection in prose it is an unending quest. However once you start seeing your own assumptions you can then use them to create a wider array of stories. Unshackled from your default settings you are more free to use the assumptions that better serve the plot, the characters, and the story.

For example I have a military SF project currently being shopped by my agents. The underlying assumptions in this setting are, from an American perspective, center-right. This is the best way to create the world, cultures, and conflicts that inform these characters. My current work in progress works primarily from a left perspective. Again by using a different set of base assumptions of what works and how people react to them I create a different set of cultures and different characters. (Or at least that is my objective, in the end only readers can tell me if I succeeded.)

No one can be truly unbiased and not work of fiction can be truly apolitical. Instead it is best to really try to dig down deep, find those underlying assumptions you have about how things really work and turn them to your advantage.