"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.
@MLClark But part of the problem that I see in the field right now, both tradpub and selfpub, is that priority is given to those SF works that have hard systems which are explained in detail. This is shaped by reviewer expectations. You see the same thing in fantasy where, again, priority is given to "hard" magic systems that are explained in detail.
Even the more "literary" works focus on "hard" systems.
And yow, does the guy ever have a thing about John Scalzi. Which...
@MLClark Scalzi is a very effective barometer by which to measure critique. He is popular because he writes rather effectively in a mode that is readable and accessible. And...he doesn't write "hard" systems. He's an exception but make no mistake. There's depth there. Even in Redshirts or Starter Villain.
It's telling that McNeil elevates Vandermeer. While Vandermeer says some interesting things, I've stopped reading him because I'm not into that absurdist edginess.
Eh. Scalzi doesn't have the greatest writing all the time - sometimes he very openly phones in his novels - but so what? He entertains his people.
He's also been critiqued for signal-boosting/QT-ing less prominent people to mock them, knowing that they'll get piled on by his fans. Just because he's "one of the good ones" doesn't make everything he does safe from criticism.
Fandom makes people get super territorial about "their" guy - but these are just tempests in teapots.
@MLClark oh yeah, Scalzi's not perfect. However, I notice in both those essays that McNeil points to him...why not Charlie Stross, for example?
Because Stross doesn't occupy the same position in fandom?
Scalzi got a huge boost by "making it" with a sensational publishing deal, and that gives him a lot more "celebrity" culture appeal, for better and for worse.
(He also keeps that shtick alive with the burritos and other playful content toying with all his "haters". I don't think Stross has a social media shtick of a similar stripe?)
@MLClark the other piece is that McNeil is not that in touch with anything other than Big Convention Fandom. I've gone to the small regional conventions in the isolated West where people attend because it's the only time all year they can hang with similar people. It's very different from Worldcon.
Stross has a very intense hard core group of fans that pulls from horror as well as SF--the mix of Merchant Princes multiverse plus Laundry Files horror.
The funny thing is, I know that McNeil runs in horror circles, but a lot of folks in his slice of horror REALLY don't like to be associated with the rest of SFF. They have their own beefs/issues, tyvm. 😉
(I find that hilarious, and part of my overall issue with our hyperfixation on specific names for genres and other superficial manifestations of working in a commercial genre. We write STORIES. And hopefully - if we're lucky - they will reflect the times we live in well.)
@MLClark oh yeah. I know about that crowd. Some of them are wannabe literary types. One of my early mentors straddled that slice as well as SF. Not fantasy, though.
I'm rather skittish about horror because their bad apples are...really bad.
Me? Well, John Steinbeck was literary and wrote stories. Same for Willa Cather, Ursula K. LeGuin, Craig Johnson...and so on.
Oh, horror just went through a NASTY news cycle, and I feel very bad for a lot of lesser-known writers caught in the churn of this latest press/anthology debacle.
It is indeed a strange scene!