Life & Wisdom Quote by Stanley Schmidt

Schmidt’s “of course” is doing the quiet heavy lifting: it’s a preemptive shrug aimed at a debate he clearly expects to be touchy. He’s conceding a limited point - yes, some science fiction sits close enough to contemporary Western reality that “Anglo and European” categories make sense - while fencing off the implication that those categories should be the default settings for the genre. The sentence reads like an editor’s corrective note, smoothing down absolutism without surrendering the ground.

The subtext is about how cultural gravity works in publishing. SF doesn’t just imagine futures; it smuggles in the unspoken furniture of the present: who gets to be “normal,” what institutions are assumed, what histories are treated as universal background noise. Schmidt’s second line lands the sharper claim: representation in the work tracks representation in the workforce. “Since many of the writers come from those backgrounds” is less a justification than a diagnosis of pipeline and gatekeeping. It’s an argument that the genre’s worldview often reflects who had access to write, sell, and be validated as “science fiction” in the first place.

Context matters here: Schmidt, long associated with the editorial center of American SF, is speaking from inside the machinery that shaped the canon. That makes the tone notably managerial - calm, reasonable, almost bureaucratic - but the implication is political. If Anglo-European assumptions dominate because Anglo-European writers dominate, then changing the fiction requires changing who gets invited into the room, not just swapping costumes in the imagined worlds.