Originally published at Thus Sayeth the Lord…. You can comment here or there.

Mitt Romney mentioned last week that his favorite novel was ‘Battlefield Earth,’ a science fiction novel by L. Ron Hubbard.

This revelation was followed by myriad bloggers decrying this or that about his choice in literature. (Mostly, “UGH! Battlefield Earth is like, soooo, horrible, I’ve heard! And wasn’t it written by that Ell Humbberd person? I don’t read him because he founded Scientology, and this means that Mormons and Scientologists are just weird kooks…”)

High intellectual debate here.

Then Romney flip-flopped in an interview posted on hughhewitt.townhall.com:

MR: (laughing) Well, you know, that’s really not my favorite novel. Probably my favorite is Huckleberry Finn and I’ve read all of Louis L’Amour’s books, I think. I may have missed one of two, but all of his westerns. You know, I have a guilty pleasure in some science fiction. A couple of my other favorite science fiction, Ann McCaffrey’s Dragon Flight, and Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. There’s some great science fiction out there.

Guilty pleasure?

Guilty?

Here are some REAL guilty pleasures for the generally standard, stalwart Mormon:

• A can of Coca-Cola, once a week
• Going swimming in a two piece bathing suit
• Stealing trail mix from your 72 hour kit
• Playing Dungeons and Dragons

From Ray Bradbury:

Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it’s the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. …Science fiction is central to everything we’ve ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don’t know what they’re talking about.

Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.

I’ve done some things I’m not proud of in my life– finishing Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, for example– but I don’t feel the slightest bit of guilt for loving, and writing, and supporting science fiction and science fiction writers. (By science fiction, I mean speculative fiction; that’s really what Romney means too, as revealed by his pointing up Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series.)

Man. If I was ever going to vote for the guy, that ‘guilty pleasure’ crack just lost it. I wonder how Obama feels about speculative fiction?