"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.
:) You're preempting my upcoming BookTube comment on this piece!
Suffice it to say:
"science fiction" is a commercial genre. Speculative fiction has taken many forms over time, and if we're hyperfixated on a specific label or material context for our work, we're missing the forest for the trees. But I'll get into that further on the weekend.