"But if we accept that SF is struggling as a literary genre because of a combination of the shift towards blockbusters-as-adaptation impacting the tie-in market, having caught up with the grim future predicted in lauded sci-fi of decades past, and the rise of new genres and subgenres drawing away the educated, persistent, high-volume readers who constitute SF’s core readership then there remains two final questions: can we save SF and should we?"
@MLClark I...don't buy this guy's assessment, especially when he shifts into Rite Gud's Squeecore critique and attributes it to the "science fiction convention scene." That raises huge red flags for me. Then he goes off into raving about Jeff Vandermeer. But he also condemns fandom as being "reactionary..."
Lots of red flags for me.
My assessment? Genres come and go--look at horror. Or Westerns. More in the next post.
@MLClark Part of what I see in the field right now is, bluntly, a pushback by middle-aged white men from all sides of the political spectrum against BIPOC, LBGTQIA+, and women. Just because he uses left terminology doesn't mean he's not unbiased.
(I have spent too much of my life being told that the class war will solve everything, don't worry your pretty little head over it)
And as an older white woman, I'm seen as a target for some of these guys.
Squeecore does have some serious classist issues in it, and that's definitely an issue for Simon: the way broader ecological and capitalist issues aren't effectively addressed by a dominant set in publishing.
But the problem with the manifestation of those concerns in this context is that... squeecore is low-hanging fruit. A seasonal blip. The underlying structure of commercial SF has always supported superficial approaches to performing activism in lieu of leading change.