Battletech Author Bryan Young Lectures Fans On Politics in Sci-Fi Writing Calling Them "Confused" If They Don't Like His Extremist Positions In Books

Battletech has gone far left and with it, authors like Bryan Young are misreading their military sci-fi fanbase.

Woke writers in formerly beloved IPs can’t help themselves when it comes to lecturing fans. Though sales continue to decline for Catalyst Game Labs and their Battletech franchise, author Bryan Young took to X this week to let war gaming fans and science fiction readers know that the franchise would continue down its path of extreme left-wing politics, even attacking fans who don’t like it as “confused.”

Battletech has been on a decline for some time, ever since fan-favorite author Blaine Pardoe revealed he had been removed from the franchise after relentless psychotic attacks from a stalker and fan who was looking to get clout within Catalyst Game Labs. Much of the onus of these attacks was because Pardoe identified as a conservative.

Many war gamers identify as conservative, and many see this as an affront to themselves. Catalyst Game Labs, meanwhile, has been pushing identity politics on every front through Battletech, with Bryan Young being one of their worst writers in that regard.

Earlier this year, Bryan Young got himself into a controversy among fans by proclaiming the popular character Anastasius Focht to be transgender. “Ulric presents it as a theory when he’s trying to work out who Focht is, and Stackpole has implied it after the fact in in-person conversations, but yeah, in that trilogy,” Young said in a thread, much to the shock of long-time Battletech fans who knew this was not the case.

Michael A. Stackpole eventually went on the record to clearly state that Focht was not designed as trans, but Bryan Young wouldn’t back down even then.

He’s taken to X after more arguments with fans in a Battletech Facebook group over the extreme-leftist agenda he’s been propagating through their game books.

“For those who might be confused,” Bryan Young said while talking down to fans who don’t like his agenda. “BattleTech has politics in it. It’s been called Game of Thrones in space. The writers write politics in their stories. Sometimes its theirs, sometimes it’s not. But without politics, it wouldn’t be BattleTech.”

He continues in a long rant: “There’s actually no such thing as apolitical sci-fi either. Imagining a future requires choices. If your sci-fi future is full of straight white people, what nightmare totalitarian past occurred to create that? That’s what you’re saying even if you think you’re being ‘neutral’”

“I'm always skeptical of science-fiction that purports to not have politics in it. That's sort of the point. We're supposed to be imagining those futures and what those changes mean for the future of humanity,” the BattleTech writer added.

“BattleTech is a fun sandbox for that reason because it's so far in the future in our specific timeline, it's fun to imagine where things would go. And since I'm primarily writing a hundred years in the future of where the setting started, I have to look at the future there, too.”

“All politics are contemporary and all politics are historical. It's all the same. The issues might change names, but the struggles are all the same,” Bryan Young concluded.

Several BattleTech fans called out the author for conflating current-year left-wing politics with Bryan Young’s extreme leftist agenda. He replied to one, saying, “I'm assuming you haven't read any of my BattleTech then because I haven't gone near any of my well-earned dislike of Trump in any of the books.”

This comment is disingenuous, as even though he might not name Trump specifically, he has been pushing the LGBTQ+ identity politics agenda fairly hard in his stories and even in interpretations of prior stories, as seen with Focht.

When called on it again, he talked down to the fan once again, saying, “Trans people existing isn’t political.”

With extremist politics being gramed as “not political” by people like Bryan Young, it’s easy to see why Battletech is falling off of the radars of many war gamers and military science fiction fans. It’s insulting to be told something hyper-political isn’t political while lecturing fans about politics in the first place. Catalyst Game Labs and Bryan Young don’t seem to understand their audiences at all, and this is shown in the sales numbers of these books compared to the works of great authors like Blaine Pardoe.

What do you think of Bryan Young’s rant at Battletech and Military Sci-Fi fans? Leave a comment and let us know.

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