Open Avocation

One of the challenges in dealing with the audience is many understanding the difference between pushing a position, and just telling a story.  Don't get me wrong - some do want to push their agenda through their books.  The Golden Compass is explicitly a critique of the church of Christianity and an attempt to "expose" its tyranny.  The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, on the other hand, is definitively a pro-Christianity book that retells the story of Christ.

However, some books are just meant to be cool stories.  My novel Schism is like that, no matter what else people want to see it as.  Schism is about how bad a second civil war could get rather than an avocation for either the Right or the Left.  Unfortunately, in this polarized world, it seems some folks can't just enjoy the story and need to be on one side or the other instead.  The Right has said that it's a squishy book that gives the Left too much credit for how "well" they'd do in any such conflict - as if a war that burns half the country could be done "well" - and the Left has said that my novel is a glorification of violence against them.

Sometimes a story is just a story(or, to quote Sigmund Freud, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar).  When I either write or read, I go to escape, and unless it's blatantly in my face, I try not to ascribe an agenda to what I read, no matter what my more political friends may say.  Perhaps the novel is trying to be political, but if I can just enjoy the story, then I don't get up in arms over it.  I know that One Second After is warning us about the fragility of society, but I enjoyed reading about real characters trying to figure out their new reality.  Empire by Orson Scott Card can be both about the dangers of political extremism and a fun story about conspiracies, depending on which way you want to read it.

In other words, stop assuming that all authors have hidden agendas they want to push on folks.  Maybe they do, but that doesn't mean you have to find them, for sometimes you find something that isn't there.