the only war that Climate Skeptics ever lost was WWII (and we have the SF books to prove it !)

People who like to contrast the big finned car culture of the Fifties with the counterculture hippie dropouts of the Sixties must remember a lot different 1950s that I do.

In the bright daylight, we sure were an optimistic bunch of baby boomers, I'll grant you that.

But at night, before the glowing screen ?

Totally dif.

It was all about invading body snatchers and slimy Blobs and radioactive mutant ants eating New York.

My mom wasn't alone in liking to read sci fi short stories and by 1961, so did I.

Most had been written between the 1930s and the 1950s, long before being bundled in science fiction hard cover anthologies in the early 1960s - these were not your current SF, by any means.

Even as a twelve year old I could tell that the older stories (which I now know were written in the pre-war late1930s and early 1940s)  had a totally different atmosphere from most of those set in my own time (actually written from the very late1940s onwards, ie in the post-war period .)

Adult re-reading only confirms it ---- and the literary critics, much more SF-oriented than me-- helped explain why.

Production SF pre 1945 vs Impact SF post 1945

Hard SF ,"production SF", really suffered a loss of faith after 1945, while soft SF, "impact SF" became what the SF magazine readers got to read (because, perhaps, that was all that talented SF writers felt like writing !)

Now I have borrowed (and adapted) the terms "production science" and "impact science" , originally conceived by Canadian-born sociologist Allan Schnaiberg in 1980 --- I first came across these terms in the work of Myanna Lahsen who I feel offers the best grained explanation for the reasons why famous scientists become infamous deniers.

Best as in , natch ,  'cause it agrees with my assessment.

Production science was about the scientists who designed and built  linear, deterministic, discrete, man-made "machines" : successfully, on time and under budget, end of story.

Impact science was the scientists who went outside the lab or worksite, into the garden where the machines had been placed and asked, how did this new machine react to all its human, biological and physical neighbours - and them to it.

It was a complex, chaotic science and so unpredictable and unexpected results were the norm of their discoveries.

As in "atomic bomb tests, done to defend America from Communist attack, end up creating mutant giant killer ants from harmless American garden ants - and they destroy New York - while the sneaky Russian Commies sent in humanitarian aid and assistance to a grateful New York state".

Hard "production' SF is Denier porn ; soft "impact" SF is sci fi for Greens .

Hiroshima Atomic Energy and Auschwitz Eugenics had made many an optimistic 1939 NY World's Fair SF Convention attendee lose a little faith by late 1945 - and it showed in their writing : most SF writers became proto-greens but some remained proto-deniers.....

The only true ALIEN in the world of SF writers is ROI and it scares the bejesus outa them

    The only obscene vulgarity a writer can perpetrate in the world of SF is talk about money, the money trail , the ROI : 'oh the horror ! the horror !

   A public invention is not just something that is technically do-able, that forte of the non-fisically oriented SF writer.
   No, to become truly public it must also be affordable and in some sense, profitable for the society that creates it.
   All great SF 'inventions' (as fruitful the SF writers have all been) remain forever private inventions - great in theory but costing so much money that they are impossible to develop in practise.
   Not "so much money" as meaning 'greater than the combined GDP of the world circa 2012'.
     Rather, instead,  as in 'costing so much money that there is too  little left to feed and shelter us earthlings and so no government (elected or otherwise) can survive in power' type of money amounts.
   This is SF viewed through the doubting eyes of a political scientists, my eyes.
    That cold ,hard eyes of "the authoritative allocation of scarce resources" type of thinker : whose first thought, every time, is
"how are we going to find the tax dollars to pay for this - and who will then oppose us enough to surely defeat us at the polls ?"
   Substitute shareholders and 'the stock market' for  voters and election ballot boxes and the result comes out the same.
   But for a right wing CEO hoping to make money on a hair-brained scheme by feeding off taxpayers money, the key to getting at that tax cash cow is (surprise !)  our friendly left wing SF writer or equally naff science journalist-cum-cheerleader, both who will open the wallets of the public by performing the necessary charm invasions first.
   Films, plays, books, albums all have their critics.
   So why don't proposed technological inventions also have their critics?
    Yes,  gentle critics with forensic audit like claws and the kindly eyes of actuaries in hot pursuit of a flaw ......

"DENIER LIT" : 'Hard' SF

     We think we know what women like to read - we claim it is something called "CHICK LIT". So what do deniers/birthers/spacers - call 'em what you will - read ?
    Can the jokes about them being unable to read, or only reading with their fingers while breathing through their mouths as the knuckles of their other hand grazes the ground , ape-style.
   These guys do read - a lot. A lot more than their younger critics probably do.
   I think we will find that they read 'Hard SF' and its close cousins - with authors like Robert Heinlein, Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton high in their Pantheon of author-prophets.

   It isn't polite today to claim that anyone other than some long dead foreign Nazis believes in "The Triumph of the human Will" - so we have had to re-brand it as "the ultimate triumph of the human spirit" , for these guys and their boy-fans.
    Nice word 'spirit'  : particularly for a bunch of perpetual teenage boys who claim to be either religious and to despise atheists or to be atheists who despise the religious.
     Both types of 'hardcore' SFers are content to wallow in a form of softcore quasi-spirtuality, totally devoid of any hardcore of orthodoxy and doctrine.
   If high American literature - from Hawthorne onward was a critic of Americanism, this genre SF ( along with all manner of 'adventure' books: westerns,spy and war) is 100% patriotic American.
   Roth and his ilk, they say, is read and written by liberal Democrats: we are read and written by conservative (ie Liberal)/libertarian Republicans.
    DENIER LIT : filling the popular genre bins of what is left of your local bookstores: pick one or ten up today......