American SFF and I have been, as the kids say, a little toxic for awhile now.

It's just been one of those things where we break up and get back together on an endless cycle, an incessant runaround of "It's not you, it's me! (but no really, it's you)," and quite frankly? I'm just burnt out. In the same vein as the ambling anxiousness of the days before you leave a boyfriend you've outgrown, I'm sick of trying to love something that isn't built to be loved the way I want to love it.

See, me? I love greedy. I'm down for something dead simple, if you want it: down for the immediate satisfaction of something there and easy and that's all, just to slake a lonely thirst and be on my way, names unnoticed, all forgotten by the time the next whatever's here is there and ready. But you can't expect me to love that. I mean, Christ. You can't give me the literary equivalent of dorm room sex at nineteen every time and expect me to make a home out of that. I'm hungry, you fucks, I want to get bigger.

I want to love with both hands: want to crawl into something and love the stickiness of it. I want love like a radiation that turns my skin translucent, wet and painful to the touch as it slides off the bone. I want mutagenesis on a cellular level. I don't think that's too much to ask for. It exists, I know it does.

It wasn't in whatever the fuck won the Hugo last year.

It's not that I don't still love science fiction, love fantasy, love stories about wonder and the fantastic. I do: of course I do. I always will. I have twin tattoos on my wrists of an acorn and a thimble, as an ode to Peter Pan. I have looping words in Vulcan scrawled down my spine. But science fiction and fantasy as a genre, as a scene, has changed. It's all gone mainstream now, which feels douchey to say (who complains when more people love the things they love?), but it's not the love or the people that I disdain: with mainstream, unfortunately, comes its nasty little bedfellow—corporate.

A character might feel pain in a novel, but it's metaphorical, it's a handwave, it's never visceral. There's no meat to it, really. It's all Biblical—a trial to make sure we deserve our happy ending. A character might feel love, or even lust, but it's spiritual. It's transcendent, it's emotional, it's never in our hands.

God this is such a good way to put it. I haven't written as much about this aspect of current SFF that has me disillusioned but it's definitely part of it. The aversion to the messiness of bodies. The dislike for description (and "visible prose"), for anything that is "unnecessary" for the story, for anything that may be uncouth or unpleasant or uncomfortable... It leads to books like this, where everything—including physical experiences—is just an idea, a symbol, an abstraction. A means to an end