NoelBWrites

Noel B

@NoelBWrites

I like writing and writing byproducts
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NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites

not to twitterpost on eggbug's internet, but this confirms why I've been feeling bored and uninspired by SFF these past few years

Jeff VanderMeer explaining that the reason his books are often shelved with "general fiction" instead of SFF is that he sells better that way: his books are too strange for genre readers.

It absolutely tracks, and it explains why he's usually not in genre award ballots (or not to the degree you would expect from someone as successful and acclaimed). It's also a confirmation of the vague feeling I've had in the past few years, that SFF got worse: more boring, more homogeneous more fandom-poisoned, more moralizing.

It shouldn't make any sense but yeah, I can see genre readers absolutely are less open to new, weird experiences than general fiction and litfic readers. It goes hand-in-hand with "hard magic systems", and wikipedia-style "worldbuilding", and pitching books based exclusively on trope lists, and "diversity" meaning "the hero's journey, but this time is a gay woman", and the writing advice urging everyone to "cut out unnecessary scenes", and trying to achieve "cinematic" prose, and high concept books that are just "X meets Y", and the endless retellings and spin-offs and fanfic with the serial number filed off, and...

You get the idea.

I know they got a lot of hate for this but the Rite Gud podcast was right on the money when they identified "squeecore" as the dominant aesthetic in SFF, and it's smothering everything that I like about genre in the first place: the potential for weird shit.

Like I'm not expecting every book I read to blow my tits clean off, but I wish mainstream SFF wasn't so committed to the "Disney Live Action Remake" style. We tell the same story that we liked as children, but with a Progressive™ coat of paint that amounts to a same-sex couple holding hands, an extra 30% of story exclusively to keep cinemasins-types from dinging you on your worldbuilding, and the entire cast of characters looking at the reader and saying "being a bad person is bad, actually".

I miss New Weird, man.

Someone fix the world so China Mieville can go back to writing fiction plz

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NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites

:sixty: this, i feel like the same shit happened with anime in the 2010s.

I was never super into anime, so I don't know what the landscape looks like lol

but the same thing happened to movies. I don't even get the impulse to watch movies anymore because 80% of it is Disney and it's all boring

I've been having a great time catching up with some sff stories lately and I'm terrified of running out of the good stuff.

fortunately there's always more good stuff, either older or in the margins, but yeah, it's less common in mainstream contemporary stuff, I think

I've also found that litfic and general fiction presses/mags/authors that are okay with "genre elements" tend to be more adventurous than ones that do exclusively SFF

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Quidam
@Quidam

I was about to say, like I love Harlan Ellison (I know, I know, not a great person, and I can tell you that some of his stories have not aged well) specifically because of the creativity involved. Plus, Cyberpunk used to be a hodge podge of different technologies in a near future. William Gibson talked about how what he still like about Neuromancer was that it was filled with guesses about how the future would look like. Now, cyberpunk feel stale. That being said, I haven't read much current books (the books I am trying to read right now are This Is How You Lose The Time War and The Dispossed), so what I am saying is more informed by other scie-fie media.

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NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites

Harlan Ellison (I know, I know, not a great person, and I can tell you that some of his stories have not aged well)

This is another part of it isn't it?

The collapsing of political activism into media consumption has made it so critique of art is reduced to critique of its politics (or the author's politics), and "good" art is just art with "good politics", which dovetails into the lack of room for ambiguity and subtlety and etc... (better critics than me have written at length about this). So we end up with an extremely flat landscape for SFF because every work must be as clearly and unambiguously endorsing the correct politics, and there is no wiggle room.

Absolutely not blaming you for it or saying that's what you're doing! But that defensive impulse of clarifying the guy sucked didn't come from nowhere. I feel it too, and it's because we half-expect people to assume "enjoying art" and "sharing its author's politics" are the same thing

(the books I am trying to read right now are This Is How You Lose The Time War and The Dispossed)

Excellent choices <3

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DeathBecomesDavid
@DeathBecomesDavid

Felt real proud of myself when I found The Cipher by Kathe Koje thru a blog. Here’s some buried treasure! Then realized this is considered a cult classic of seedy horror and splatterpunk, I just hadn’t heard of it because its just the kind of work to be forgotten to time and shuttled out of conversation with the fiction I was finding online.

I do love the labor of searching for good, spooky art, but its a little heartbreaking when you find yourself looking down the hall of abandoned works. It gets me cynical, like I should give up on searching for the new when the old is so wholly evicted from memory. A bad metric told hold any art to, but here we are.

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