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

and he used it exclusively to roast himself through Nth layers of meta

My dude loved to break the fourth wall just so he could build a fifth wall, break that one too, climb on your shoulder and point and laugh at the tiny Borges currently trying to rebuild the fourth wall with the shittiest possible mortar available

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.

(Please understand that when I say "racism" I mean "...and xenophobia, sexism, ableism, general misanthropy, etc." …We'll get there. )

Abstract

For the third entry of my "Fair and Balanced™ Reviews of Craft Books" series, I read The Science of Storytelling, by Will Storr. In my Fair and Balanced™ opinion, this book hates science as much as it hates storytelling, but not as much as it hates human people. When I say this, I'm not making a glib joke about the poor quality of the book and how painful of an experience it was to read it. I'm actually saying this book is dripping with contempt for humanity, and I cannot fathom why the author chose a career in the arts if the mere idea of genuine human connection is so foreign to him as to seem risible.

Introduction: Life is meaningless and people are horrible