There are some authors who, quite frankly, should leave their politics at the door. It seems to me that when an author of popular fiction whose work I tended to enjoy starts injecting their politics in their writing, it usually also happens to be the case that their writing has fallen below a certain level of quality that makes them no longer readable in any case.

Now, don’t get me wrong–I am not necessarily suggesting a cause-and-effect relationship. I just happen to notice the two things tend to happen at about the same time. It certainly happened to Tom Clancy. I greatly enjoyed his early books, including The Hunt for Red October, The Cardinal and the Kremlin, The Sum of All Fears, and Without Remorse (which I am re-reading right now). Guy books, certainly, but that describes all of Clancy’s books. Debt of Honor is a special case–part of my problem with the book is that I am familiar with Japan, and so most times when Clancy writes about things in Japan, I wince at how horribly wrong he gets so much of the stuff. I could write a long blog post just on that, and maybe I will, if I re-read that book again as well.

But you could see that Clancy was getting stilted with Executive Orders, and by the time he did The Bear and the Dragon, his writing was horrible. And it was with those last two books that Clancy also started preaching politics. Like I said, the two are not connected–Bear was unreadable for so many reasons having nothing to do with the politics, but the politics came right when Clancy was so markedly going downhill. One passage stood out to me from that book, where Ryan was discussing abortion with van Damm. Ryan predicated his argument on this concept:

“Arnie, it’s like this. The pro-abortion crowd says that whether or not a fetus is human is beside the point because it’s inside a woman’s body, and therefore her property to do with as she pleases.”

The whole line of reasoning started with that presumption, that abortion rights were based upon the idea of a fetus as property even if the fetus were considered a human life, a predication so absurd as to be laughable; and yet, Ryan’s supposedly left-leaning and pro-choice counselor, van Damm, accepts this without challenge.

It’s passages like these that can usually turn a book sour for me; for example, my brother gave me a crime novel once called No Lesser Plea. I was already having trouble with the premise, that the state could have a brutal killer dead to rights, and he gets off by throwing a fit in court and then the liberal pansies put him in psychological rehabilitation for a short time and then set him loose on the streets again. I stopped reading altogether when the author described a court-appointed psychologist thusly: “He considered himself a liberal, in that he believed that when black people were violent and committed crimes it was not really their fault.” The abortion passage in Bear did not turn me off from the whole book like that line in Plea, but it sure didn’t help.

I tried reading Rainbow Six, the next Clancy book after Bear, thinking Clancy may have come back into form, but it was just as bad if not worse. The contrived opening had members of an elite squad of counter-terrorism agents taking a commercial flight–which then just happens to get hijacked! Sure!

Now I’m seeing the same kind of thing happening again, this time with a different author. Orson Scott Card has been highly controversial outside his writing, but as long as that kind of thing stays separate, I am able to enjoy the fiction without the person’s politics interfering–else I would never be able to enjoy a movie featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, or Mel Gibson. And three of Card’s works remain my favorites: Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, and Pastwatch. In his public persona, Card has been something of an asswipe. Despite claiming to be a Democrat and saying he has nothing against gays, he nevertheless has advocated that “laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books” and that gays “cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens” within a society with certain sexual mores. He has also been a rather vociferous and outspoken advocate of George W. Bush, the war in Iraq, and the whole “War on Terror” paradigm; just a few weeks ago, before the midterm elections, he wrote this:

There is only one issue in this election that will matter five or ten years from now, and that’s the War on Terror….I say this as a Democrat, for whom the Republican domination of government threatens many values that I hold to be important to America’s role as a light among nations. But there are no values that matter to me that will not be gravely endangered if we lose this war.

Card is also pro-life, believes a right to privacy does not legally exist, and believes that the Democratic Party is “self-destructive,” “extremist-dominated,” and “insane.” He lauds Fox News and urges everyone to vote Republican. But he says he’s a Democrat because he is pro-gun-control and is critical of free-market capitalism and southern racism.

It goes without saying that venturing into Card’s politics is, to say the least, an ugly, sticky affair. But in the past, much of his fiction has been superlative (not all of it, to be sure). A lot of people didn’t like Speaker for the Dead as much as I did, but Ender and Pastwatch tend to be greatly popular, and I certainly can read them again and again–but only in the way that I can still read the early Clancy novels. For some time, however, Card’s writing has been sliding (his Bean-centered Ender books marked this slide), and now it seems that Card is officially jumping his own literary shark with his new book, Empire.

The plot: a terrorist attack which kills the president and vice-president touches off a new American civil war when blue-state liberals declare New York the capital and claim control of the country. You can read the first five chapters on Card’s site (a usual preview he does for his new books). The politics surge in with Chapter Two, in which we meet a conceited, snotty, East-coast Ivy-League liberal who preaches the virtues of Empire over a Republic and acts all condescending to the reasonable, intelligent veteran whom he calls “Soldier Boy.” The conservative hero sees the liberal student body as:

…ignorant of any real-world data that didn’t fit their preconceived notions. And even those who tried to remain genuinely open-minded simply did not realize the magnitude of the lies they had been told about history, about values, about religion, about everything. So they took the facts of history and averaged them with the dogmas of the leftist university professors and thought that the truth lay somewhere in the middle.

Card does something even more manipulative, which is to make the right-wing protagonist appear to be questioning his own worldview, and, of course, concluding logically and objectively that he is in fact correct to be conservative. The presence of such soul-searching simply marks Card’s realization that the reader will question Card’s bias, so Card inserts the language to try to make it seem like it has been reasoned out–but it comes across as just as self-serving as Clancy’s taking both “sides” of the abortion debate, with a right-wing author using a falsely “objective” device to validate a biased view.

Card’s adulation of Bush is clear:

Truth to tell, this President had changed things. Without ever getting a bit of credit for it, he had transformed the military from the cripple it had been when he took office into the robust force with new doctrines that had the enemies of the United States on the run.

I could go into detail in knocking over this fantasy, but I think you know the fallacies here as well as I do. (Trust me, I could go into a long rant here about how Bush has decimated our military capability in a war completely divorced from terrorism, but to go into more detail would detour too long from the present topic.) In any case, that passage begins Chapter Four, which describes the terrorist attack–in detail which is as bizarre as it is beyond one’s ability to suspend disbelief. From there:

…a radical leftist army calling itself the Progressive Restoration takes over New York City and declares itself the rightful government of the United States. Other blue states officially recognize the legitimacy of the group, thus starting a second civil war.

Interestingly, the Publisher’s Weekly review on the Amazon.com page for the novel (the source of the above synopsis) rather flatly pans the book, saying that “right-wing rhetoric trumps the logic of story and character,” and “the action is overshadowed by the novel’s polemical message.” But I guess that Amazon prints their reviews automatically, good or bad (some of the other reviews are good, which is surprising, as the first chapters–not to mention the plot–are so abysmally bad.

Maybe Clancy and Card are exceptions, and the seepage of personal politics into writing is not a sign of an author going downhill. But within the miniature statistical universe of these two writers, it’s certainly no question that the two events coincided.

Update: I just remembered that Michael Crichton might be a member of the club, though I think his drop-off in writing quality came somewhat before his anti-environmentalist polemic.