#gonna use this stupid degree to be smart on tumblr dot com

[rynnaaurelius]

There's no one-to-one hard, easy answer, but the TLDR is that sci-fi was an outgrowth of 'frontier' literature, essentially (think American westerns, Russian Caucasus-set stories, British exploration, etc etc). Exploration of the unknown meets reflection of anxieties of the time meets sudden growth and fascination of technology (hence why sci-fi seems to burst out in discrete time periods—aligning with early 20th c. tech and science discoveries, space race of the sixties, invention of the Internet).

This is also why there's no hard sci-fi "lineage"—the roots of sci-fi is typically imperialist, because that's what was/is often published for the English-speaking world, and what influences the next generation. Star Trek has colonialist and imperialist elements because it was heavily influenced by British exploration naval novels, as well as more contemporary speculative sci-fi—Roddenberry was open about being influenced by early hallmarks of sci-fi such as Space Beagle, a 1950s set of novels set as a pretty action-adventure space wars which helped influence space opera. He was also influenced by a lot of movies with the same thing—Westerns had been reborn and repackaged with the Moon and space as the frontier, which left a lot of creative space and, uh, projection. Hornblower In Space is a terribly apt way to describe TOS, and those are novels about a British Imperial Naval Captain during the Napoleonic wars.

As for earlier influences: A Princess of Mars, today, is a pretty obscure novel, but published in the 1920s by Edgar Rice Burroughs (more famous for writing Tarzan), about a Confederate soldier post-civil war who is accidentally transported to Mars, which is inhabited by a pair of fighting human empires and ostracized alien tribes, and is essentially gifted demigod status due to Mars's lesser gravity. It forms a lot of tropes that HEAVILY influenced later fantasy and sci-fi. The reason the Superman comics advertise him as "able to leap buildings in a single bound, faster than a speeding bullet", is because the writers read APoM and its sequels, where the hero COULD do that, and were using shorthand from Burroughs.

(they are, of course, INCREDIBLY racist and misogynistic per the time, but they're very fun historical curio to read if you're into that)

In more relevant stuff, H. G. Wells's stuff is famous for its social critique on progression of society, xenophobia, and class division in The Time Machine/War of the Worlds. He's the most famous for it, and the issue has evolved considerably, but "progression of society" is kinda the eternal question in sci-fi and what-ifs attract people—Soviet sci-fi spent decades relitigating the Nazis lol (to sometimes. Uh. Bad effect. Look up the Dulles Plan).

Asimov was very obsessed later on with the idea of history and the practice of historicity in the future, as chronicled through the collapse of empire in his Foundation novels from the sixties and seventies. Solaris (Sixties/seventies Polish novel, Soviet-Russian film. Ignore the Clooney film) reflected worried about human limitations in face of the unknowable unknown and efforts to quantitate it.

(I SUPER recommend the body of work of the director Tarkovsky to anyone interested in non-English sci-fi films)

In the opposite direction, you have Decolonial sci-fi, a movement conversant with Latin American magical realism and Indigenous Futurism, which are often more concerned with imagining a future and the trauma of the present (I am less knowledgeable here, apologies. I just know the short version. I have a reading list for myself that I can send people, if they want?). The past is much less-anxiety inducing, but by no means universal sentiment. The Rwandan musical film Neptune Frost is about an anti-colonialist hacker collective, and much more concerned with the past. Very surreal, very good.

Anyways. As for the Confederacy specifically. It's been around for a while! L. Neil Smith's The Probability Broach from the seventies is, I think, the earliest influential work to specifically use the Confederacy (as in, the 1794 confederation) as a state, and not just a reference a la Burroughs? It's set around the idea of the Confederacy as an, uh, libertarian state concerned with unanimous governance. Not obsessed with slavery, but rather a different thing, set around the idea of the Whiskey Rebellion succeeding and Washington is shot for treason after the word 'unanimous' was added to the Declaration of Independence back in 1776.

I really have no idea how to quantify those novels beyond weird and what you would expect from a libertarian thought experiment on weed. Slavery is abolished in 1820 peacefully by Jefferson, and central government is abolished, as other animals like primates, dolphins, and orcas, prove their sentience and are granted citizenship and rights.

From there, nativist backlash and worries about authoritarianism really began bubbling up through the 80s and 90s, and that's when you begin to see, uh, other things.

(also I think this is the second time I have been in your notifs, very sorry about that lol. Didn't realize until I checked the URL)

Ok I'm not sure if you are the right person to ask but, what's up with sci-fi and is confederacy apologia? Both British comic rogue trooper and Firefly has done it. And while I get a american doing confederacy apologia what's up with the Brits doing it too?

I’m not the right person to ask! I remember reading or hearing somewhere that sci-fi emerged as a form of imperial fiction but beyond that I don’t know very much about the history of the genre