Uh huh.

[james_davis_nicoll]

How Jim Baen saved SF, Earth and the universe from commie leftist nihilistic postmodern anti-Western New Wave Literati.

My favourite sentence:

The "New Wave" was never really popular (New Worlds, the major New Wave magazine in Britain, was bailed out by public money after the buyers and readers stayed away in droves), but it might well have had the purely negative achievement of driving traditional science-fiction writers out of publishing.

Most people would have put "New Wave: A More Terrible Menace to SF than Evelyn E. Smith!" into a different paragraph than "New Wave: Nobody Reads it anyway." Almost nobody would have put those sentiments into the same sentence.

Comments

[grimjim.livejournal.com]

According to a book review elsewhere I read, Reagan expressed the idea of bankrupting the USSR via an arms race even as far back as the 60s. Gore Vidal pegged it when he described the strategy of escalating military spending as one of who goes bankrupt first. Therefore, Baen's contribution was far smaller than the piece claims. If SDI hadn't been proposed, some other incredibly expensive military megaproject would have been used in its place.

[(Anonymous)]

Queue the Super Trooper (http://groups.google.com/group/soc.history.what-if/browse_frm/thread/b3eb7d3fce74ccab/758af1d6c53c707b?#758af1d6c53c707b) thread from SHWI.

-Will (http://thedragonstales.blogspot.com).

[matt-ruff.livejournal.com]

Would that be the theory that ABBA brought down the Soviet Union?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

http://econ161.berkeley.edu/Politics/fitzgerald.html

appears to argue that it was Communism that broke the SU, not the US. Of course, since Reagan was a union man and therefore as red as my underwear, I wouldn't expect him (if he was still alive) or his pinko supporters to admit that Soviet communism is a lousy way to run an economy.

[timgueguen.livejournal.com]

No doubt there is some parallel universe to ours where Jimmy Carter was reelected in 1980, began a huge arms buildup because of Afghanistan, although probably not one with a Star Wars type effort or as bloated as the Reagan one, and where conservatives argue that said buidup had nothing to do with Communism collapsing. Which of course, as in our universe, it really didn't, but they only argue it because Carter was in office and not a conservative like Reagan.