To be sure, various types of genre fiction have long had presidential sanction. Franklin Delano Roosevelt loved to relax with mystery novels, which perhaps taught him some of his famous guile. More conservative presidents have an affinity with the westerns, which offered a homespun and mythic of American history. Dwight Eisenhower admired the shoot-em-up epics of Zane Gray and Max Brand while Ronald Reagan enjoyed the cowboy novels of Louis L'Amour. It's not a surprise that John F. Kennedy, with his glamorous sex life and penchant for covert action, was an aficionado of the James Bond series.

Although Gingrich has been widely mocked for his advocacy of a permanent colony on the moon which could eventually be incorporated as an American state, many of his earlier proposals sound like pitches for Hollywood summer blockbusters rather than sober Washington policy ideas. In his 1994 book To Renew America he asked, "Why not aspire to build a real Jurassic Park? (It may not be at all impossible, you know.) Wouldn't that be one of the most spectacular accomplishments of human history?" In his 1984 book Window of Opportunity, co-written with second wife Marianne Gingrich and science fiction writer David Drake, Gingrich called for "A mirror system in space [which] could provide the light equivalent of many full moons so that there would be no need for nighttime lighting of the highways." According to Gingrich and company, one benefit of these giant space mirrors would be that the "ambient light covering entire areas could reduce the current danger of criminals lurking in darkness."

As tempting as it is to dismiss these far-fetched schemes as evidence of Gingrich's personal grandiosity, they are actually evidence of something much more important, the deep affinity between American conservatism and one branch of science fiction.

Historically, science fiction has been a literature of the left, with writers as diverse as Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, George Orwell and Ursula K. Le Guin using the genre to explore ideas about socialism, technological transcendence, radical democracy and feminism. As critics like Fredric Jameson have argued, the affinity between science fiction and the left has been a natural one, with both the literary form and the political tradition built on attempts to imagine radically alternative futures and, in the case of writers like Orwell, trying to figure out some of the problems with changing the world.

Yet in the last 60 years, there has emerged a powerful right-wing counter-tradition in science fiction which offers a vision of a future dominated by the capitalism and American military might. This influential strand of flag-waving futuristic fiction has shaped the worldview of countless readers, not least of whom is Newt Gingrich.