I always find it vaguely amusing when the few (but regular) bits of hatemail arrive in my inbox from people disparaging Futurismic as a left-wing site, because it’s never really occurred to me that it has any such agenda. Sure, a lot of what we post here tends to be regarding subjects that are antithetical to classical conservatism, but it’s not as if we don’t question stuff from the other side of the arbitrary political fence; for me at least, thinking realistically about the future involves trying to see past such old and cumbersome philosophical binaries. Indeed, I believe it’s that very binary opposition which is holding us back from our potential as a species…

But I digress – liberalism is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose. But thanks to Wired, those of you looking for a more right-wing flavour to your science fiction news have a new URL to add to your RSS reader: Republibot describes itself as describes itself as “The science fiction site for people who aren’t drooling knee-jerk liberals.”

Nothing like squeezing a sweeping ad hominem into your strapline, I guess… but they follow it with: “In our minds, Science Fiction is all about asking questions and being open minded to the answers. Sometimes the answers are reassuring, sometimes they’re disturbing, and sometimes there are no answers at all, but the point is to keep asking the questions.” So maybe they’re not as different to the supposedly left-wing fans as they’d like to think! 😉

At a first glance (and despite a small original fiction section), Republibot looks to be more focussed on media sf than written, so I don’t know how much interest I’m going to get out of it, but nonetheless I’m going to follow along for a while and see what’s happening over there. Can anyone recommend any other explicitly political science fiction sites – from either side of the divide?