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1. So I have a few thoughts on H.G. Wells, Henry James, Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport, National Review & how sci-fi & fantasy became the lingua franca of political discourse.
2. H.G. Wells & Henry James were friends once, even talked about collaborating on a novel about a voyage to Mars, but feuded. Their personal rift was emblematic of a larger split between genre & literary fiction.
3. The Wells/James rift was complicated but based on the two men deciding they didn't like each others approach to fiction: James seeing Wells as slapdash plotmonger & Wells concluding James was a effete wanker.
4. With the Wells/James beak-up, we see "literary" fiction (bourgeois, private, mimetic, committed to recording impressionistic shades of feeling) divorcing from fantastika or genre (populist, public, anti-mimetic, committed to narrative drive)
5. Of the two sides of the mimetic/fantastika it is obviously fantastika that is better equipped to deal with politics. Modern fantastika (encompassing the gothic, horror, fantasy & science fiction) was born out of the need to register the world crisis of the French Revolution.
6. While fantastika (Mary Shelley, Verne,Wells etc.) was trying to register the public of world of promethean technology, class war, revolution & imperialism, the bourgy mimetic novel was pointedly anti-political: a retreat into the private world of sensibility.
7. So it's been true from Frankenstein to Game of Thrones that it's fantastika that has consistently provided us with the language for talking about public life: Think of 1984, The Handmaid's Tale, Star Wars, Harry Potter.
8. The reception of Lord of the Rings offers a good example of how different political ideologies (sometimes waring ones) can find the allegorical suggestiveness of fantastika useful.
9. In the early 1960s, National Review editor Frank Meyer (the founder of what is now called fusionist conservatism) became a big Tolkien fan. He thought the orcs were a symbol of "the reds." He encouraged Guy Davenport to read, who passed along the enthusiasm to Hugh Kenner.
10. Here are some 1963 letters from Davenport to Kenner, sharing Meyer's ideas about Lord of the Rings as an anti-communist allegory. Tolkien of course was pointedly hostile to all allegorical readings. 
11. Kenner caught the Tolkien bug and toyed with the idea of using a quote from Lord of the Rings to open the big critical book he was working on The Pound Era. The idea being that Tolkien was a popular version of Pound's project of recuperating tradition.
12. Interesting, Kenner also notice that there was no paperback version of Lord of the Rings. He tried to push his publisher (Beacon) to do the book. If they had, they would've made millions. In actuality, the lack of paperback led to a pirated edition from Ace.
13. But the National Review rightists weren't the only ones interested in Tolkien. The pirated Ace edition (published using a loophole in copyright law) carried an introduction by Peter Beagle which claimed Lord of the Rings for countercultural environmentalism.
14. The thing with allegories is that they can be read in different ways, and its easy for competing factions to repurpose them for different ends. Were orcs evil reds or rapacious industrialists?
15. All of which is to say that it's natural to use fantastika to describe the world, so @paulkrugman & @mattyglesias reference Asimov's Foundation, resistance liberals Harry Potter, feminists Handmaid's Tale, Bernie supporters Dune, & NR types Tolkien.
16. I should add, of course, that these political readings are not the only way into s.f. & fantasy. Guy Davenport also wrote a beautiful essay about Tolkien as a teacher and also what he might have gleaned from a Kentucky friend: nytimes.com/1979/02/23/arc…
