What is it about freedom lit?

Freedom literature sucks, more often than not. I'm actually stating this rather mildly; the sentence would probably be more accurate if you dropped the last four words.

The "freedom movement" has a lot of sub-sets. There's the Libertarians (big- and little-L). There's the "left-libertarians" - the agorists and mutualists and what have you. There's roughly as many flavors of anarchist as there are anarchists. They despise the "minarchists," in all their multitudinous flavors. There's the pitiful remains of the militia movement. There's the sovereignty movement types. There are all sorts of Christian groups that usually concentrate on RealID and its parallels with the Mark of the Beast. Lots and lots of sub-sets.

They all have one thing in common; they all sit around dreaming about the way the world ought to be and/or the way it'll fall apart, they all write fiction about their dreams, and it all sucks. Okay, that's three things.

Classic examples, recently encountered, here and here.

Even good writers who stoop to fiction somehow fall under this unfortunate spell. I give you Vin Suprynowicz, an awesome writer of angry essays and columns about TPTBs outrages against freedom. Give him a quill and a license to write fiction, and he disgorges The Black Arrow, as self-indulgent an exercise in bad fiction as was ever penned by an otherwise excellent writer. A superhero...uh, hero. Hot chicks. Evil, stupid baddies. Lectures, lectures, lectures. At least TBA has decent grammar and punctuation, mostly.

L. Neil Smith, probably the best-known living Libertarian author, wrote The Probability Broach in 1980ish and a whole bunch of books since then. He's got a regular following among all sorts of freedomistas. And he can't find a publisher. Why can't he find a publisher? Because that "regular following" of his (which includes me) probably doesn't number more than a few thousand people. And I understand why: Good stories, mostly, but yowza howdy does that man ever like to lecture. Talk, talk, talk.

And that's one of the two problems I see, which condemns "freedom lit" to such a ghetto of mediocrity. The first, of course, is obvious: We're a bunch of amateurs. I'd guess that most erotica is probably awful too, and for the same reason. People like to write about what they like to think about. People like to think about sex. But that doesn't mean they know the craft well enough to write a readable story.

But how does that explain writers like Smith, or Suprynowicz, or Royce: Good, professional writers of polemic essays, who fall on their faces with fiction? I think it's just that they can't lay off the polemics. They want to educate. That's great, but education is not the principal purpose of fiction. Fiction must entertain; first, last and always. Otherwise any beneficial message woven into the story will be lost because the only message the reader will get is "this book sucks."

People, there is absolutely no point - you have no right - in complaining that no large audience of readers will appreciate your fiction, if your fiction sucks. I'm sorry it's that way, I really am. But that's the way it is. Reality sucks sometimes, too.