.webp?h=8 "P-Hat (blue) - Ughhhh coming up with different descriptions for RuneScape party hats")
This story, from the latest Clarkesworld, is set in a grim dystopian future where recent Asian immigrant parents tolerate this kind of thing. Oh and they remember this while living underwater after the climate apocalypse. The story isn't actually bad but hitting picrel was like biting a bit of extremely funny eggshell.
Today's fiction is often accused of avoiding sincerity, but this isn't strictly true. In order to bypass the fear of cringe or mockery, you must graft your topic to some vaguely currentyear theme. For example, take childhood nostalgia. It's okay to be serious and sentimental about your grandma's ethnic cooking that the other kids in school said smelled bad, while the same kind of treatment of your mayo mom's PB+Js would be considered cheese. If we peel away the vague racecruft connection for this kind of thing, we're left with a very conventional sentimentality (not that this is inherently bad).
This story has a very traditional emotional core, about the protagonist mourning a romantic partner, with a kind of non-literal sci-fi element used to explore those feelings. However, the dead partner is a they-them (different from the character in picrel). I find it hard to believe that this story would have been published without the (completely irrelevant) pronouns of the dead partner, or little throwaways like Shirley's queerplatonic orangutan fricker, because then we would be left with the simple age-old narrative of a widow mourning her husband.
Maybe I should just challenge myself to write the straggiest thing I can think of and see if I get accepted.
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Science fiction is a dead genre, and the publishers killed it. Go into any bookstore and brose the selection in the vanishingly small row of shelves dedicated to science fiction (some bookstores don't even bother to pretend sci fi has its own individual merit and just cram the genre in with the fantasy books). New title? LGBTQIA2SSTRAG+++ nonsense. Author's name? Diversity hire. Copies sold? None. Yet oddly enough, the individual authors that dominate the most shelf space are all straight, white males who were published decades ago. Frank Herbert's Dune, Niven's Ringworld, Asimov's Foundation, even anti-homo crusader Card's Ender's Game still packs shelves. The publishing industry knows the genre only succeeds off of the back of cis-heteronormativity (not being a strag), and strangles it for its temerity.
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to be completely fair most sci fi novels were always terrible and only a select few were any good.
I also think that without the zeitgeist of modernity sci fi ends up being stale. It's all dystopian.
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Most novels are terrible and get filtered out of public consciousness as they fail the test of time. The problem with science fiction is that 50 year old titles are propping the entire genre up.
This is true but the industry has decided modern sci fi zeitgeist is 100% LGBTBIPOC nonsense only. They've tried to turn the genre exclusively into an incubator for that nonsense and the audience has rejected it.
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Sad but mostly true. I generally see a decent size sci-fi shelf, but as you say it is split between decades-old books by classic cishet authors, and modern wokeshit that sells zero copies. SF is clearly beloved, but the majority of new work that might actually appeal to normal readers ends up self published. Success is possible there, but Amazon has no quality control and most people wouldn't take a chance (I'm not paying people real money for Kindle-only stuff).
My hope is that we've already passed peak shitlib, and that publishers in the coming years will like money enough to consider the young men who actually enjoy the genre. But we'll see what happens.
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I doubt it, novels as entertainment is long past its prime. Reading has always been a pastime of the upper middle class, so the industry is only going to cater to a narrower and narrower demographic of woke libs that continue to buy books. Maybe self-publishing is the way to go, but that's still further proof that science fiction is a niche, barely extant sub-genre.
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