Last year, Esquire magazine published a list of “The 50 Best Fantasy Books if All Time.” Harry Potter wasn’t on the list. Instead, sitting at the top was The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin, a work of fantasy with analogs to the real-life history of slavery on Earth that won the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

The genres of pulp fiction (or what is now called “speculative fiction”) that include hard-boiled crime, horror, fantasy, and science fiction, have often both challenged the conservative cultural values of a society and reinforced the idea of a clear battle of good versus evil. The field had true diversity, allowing plots that fought racism and questioned gender roles, such as in Star Trek, and writers who challenged cultural norms, including libertarian philosopher Robert Heinlein and crime-writing legend Mickey Spillane.

Spillane, the subject of a new biography , wrote books including I, the Jury and the anti-communist One Lonely Night. Spillane’s books often feature a protagonist, usually private detective Mike Hammer, going to battle against immoral lowlifes. Hammer himself was not a saint, but as Spillane explained, sometimes his hero was “the monster” that crushed evil, thus making the way for good. It’s no wonder Ayn Rand loved Spillane . So did the public: Spillane’s books have sold more than 225 million copies.

J.K. Rowling , the author behind the Harry Potter franchise, has also sold millions of books. Just as Spillane found himself an outsider to the literary establishment in the 1950s, Rowling has now been canceled by our cultural elites — though the wider public continues to love her and her work. Rowling’s dilemma points to an important problem within the creative industry: Even though fans and creators of speculative fiction are open to all kinds of different stories and characters, even conservative ones, the field is increasingly controlled by a woke elite.

One of Rowling’s defenders who is concerned with the Left’s intolerance is science fiction writer Brad R Torgersen. ”To put Jemisin ahead of Tolkien on the Esquire list — while completely omitting J.K. Rowling — is laughable,” said Torgersen, whose book, A Star-Wheeled Sky, won the 2019 Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. He added, “Also, where are David Eddings, Tracy Hickman, and Stephen R. Donaldson? Leaving them off the list seems to be an act of willful ignorance.”

Another fantasy author, John C. Wright, was also critical of the list. Wright believes that much of fantasy and science fiction has been taken over by wokeness, which makes the gender and social justice awareness of the author and characters more important than plot and talent. Wright says that many of the works on the Esquire list are newer authors who are being feted at the expense of the masters.

“Number one on the list was not any work by J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Ursula K. LeGuin, George R.R. Martin, or L. Frank Baum,” Mr. Wright said when the list came out, “but a work of ‘woke’ by N.K. Jemisin that no fan of fantasy has any interest in reading. Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lord Dunsany, Abraham Merritt, Clarke Ashton Smith, Andre Norton, Jack Vance, were not even mentioned anywhere in what purported to be the best fantasy of all time, nor was William Morris, who invented the genre.”

Wright claims that science fiction and fantasy have become more about social justice than fighting dragons or blasting into space. He may be right. In 2019, for example, a list of the year’s best science fiction according to “the experts” included many stories that don’t deal with swashbuckling interstellar explorers, but with climate change. Characters in The Bookstore at the End of America by Charlie Jane Anders, Peter Watts’s Cyclopterus, and Alec Nevala-Lee’s At the Fall all survive in a world almost ruined by global warming. Likewise, income inequality is the theme of E. Lily Yu’s Green Glass: A Love Story, Rich Larson’s Contagion’s Even at the House Noctambulous, and Ted Chiang’s It’s 2059 and the Rich Kids Are Still Winning. And as with The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin’s writing focuses on race in Emergency Skin.

In the summer of 2019, the magazine Analog Science Fiction and Fact announced it would drop John W. Campbell’s name from its annual prize for best new science fiction writer. The decision came after Jeanette Ng, the 2019 award winner, criticized Campbell in her acceptance speech . “He is responsible for setting a tone for science fiction that haunts this genre to this very day,” she said. “Stale, sterile, male, white, exalting in the ambitions of imperialists, colonialists, settlers and industrialists.”

John W. Campbell was a pivotal figure in the history of American science fiction, transforming much of it from pulp fantasy to accomplished storytelling and even literature. As Alec Nevada-Lee notes in Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, “for more than three decades, an unparalleled series of visions of the future passed through his tiny office in New York, where he inaugurated the main series of science fiction that runs through works from 2001 to Westworld.”

Campbell published thousands of stories and launched the careers of people such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert A. Heinlein. Campbell was the author of sci-fi under his own name and as Don A. Stuart. His most famous story is probably Who Goes There?, which became the classic movie The Thing. It’s about an unthinking, irrational monster that tries to destroy everything in its path — kind of like the modern woke mob.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil' s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.