And I don’t have to go as far as LS&2SB or those other films; middle-class people like my own mom seem to be sympathetic enough to the right-wingers in Canada on image and sound-byte alone (sometimes without knowing anything about their platforms, even) to put right-wing governments into power. I think it’s a marketing thing, and the Right has always been much better at marketing itself to the masses than the Left, even the very moderate Left.

However, if you want to move this beyond partisanship and actually get into someones head, go back and watch a film like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, or The Bank Job. None of the guys in these films are corporate fatcats, and some are more criminal than entrepreneurs, but the fact is, even if they never voted “tory” or “Republican” as individuals, or saw themselves as corporate guys, it’s groups of lower middle and middle middle voters like that who put Republicans into office.

Well, forgive me if I’m being partisan but I find it’s less often that Republicans deal with things that would benefit me were I an American. It’s hard to make things sexy when they benefit the masses less and a small elite more, and this is, indeed, what my impression of Republican policies are like. It might be unfair, but it’s my impression.

On the entrepreneurial narrative: yes, Rand is horrible, but actually, in SF, the whole business/enmtrepreneurship trope is still big. In the hard SF area, for example, Stephen Baxter has written several works (especially the Manifold novels) that deal with space travel and antrepreneurism; but space travel is a dud for many of the hard SF writers for reasons Charles Stross discusses quite sensibly here.

There are sensible criticisms of his arguments in various places online (like here and here) but very few of the objections are reasonable within a sensible time-scale, or given the technologies we can reasonably expect to have in the next fifty or hundred years.

In other words, the reasons space travel is a bust for entrepreneurial types is because to date, it hasn’t ever made a profit, and it’s unlikely to do so for the next while yet.

Yet, I should note, Stross and others often focus on economics, on characters that could be considered “entrepreneurs” of a kind, and often enough in a positive way.

The easy reason? Because air setting a story on an air carrier or (realistic) space shuttle is hard if you want to (a) do it right and (b) write about something other than the space shuttle or air carrier. Mostly (a), I think. Jetse de Vries has accused the SF-writing community of being lazy in its habitual turning to dystopia and shunning optimistic or celebratory perspectives on innovation and change, and I think he may well be right in that.

I know you weren’t specifically talking about SF, but it seemed a fitting genre to point at for the discussion, and it’s the one I know best…

That said, and while I’m not Ayn Rand’s biggest fan, I do think there is a pontential goldmine for someone who does want to sing the praises of being an entrepreneur. Along the same lines, and I believe another potentially “Republican” friendly Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff was a brilliant work of non-fiction. It’s hard to believe that we don’t see more movies and novels set on air carriers or involving aviation or space travel (but in the nuts and bolts sense, not the Star Trek sense) and I fail to understand why creative people have ceded so much ground to non-fiction writers.