DarkGamer
Zach WeinersmithOffhand thought - I wonder if part of why sci fi and fantasy are so huge now is that a lot of the genres that would've scratched the same escapist itch are now hard to do inoffensively. Like a lot of 19th century adventure literature is oriented around white adventurers visiting strange cultures, romancing hot locals, stealing stuff, and getting away. Setting it among aliens or elves or whatever allows the same story, theoretically minus the dehumanizing.
So in other words, it's not so much that fantasy/sci fi is big as... it swallowed a bunch of other genres that would've once been called adventure, e.g. barbarian stuff, jungle explorers, life in the far north, westerns in general.
A good example to my mind is Flashman. The storycrafting is great, the character is fascinating, but... man, my limit is pretty high for offensiveness in good books, but by book 4 or so I couldn't do it. But, I understand someone redid flashman in the Warhammer setting, because all (well, most) of the dastardly deeds are OK if you do them to fantasy monster creatures.
ggdupont@ZachWeinersmith
> part of why sci fi and fantasy are so huge now
I sometimes think it's also just a generation issue: all people born in the 70/80's have had a childhood full of sci fi and fantasy which was mainly targetted at children.
These are now grown adults and thus a nice market segment to target with easy existing franchises.
Joshua@ZachWeinersmith personally my tolerance for doing that to fantasy monster creatures is almost as low as real world groups of people
Yves L. Jardin-Noam@ZachWeinersmith
I don't know. Maybe those genres (sci-fi, fantasy) just absorbed the others? Like market consolidation after a boom of new stuff, the less robust genres were absorbed (it feels icky to use this metaphor, due to the capitalist tones).
Part of my point is that sci-fi and fantasy have equally troublesome histories. Orcs et al as stand-ins for racist depictions are well known, as are eugenics and "rational" supremacy in sci-fi.
Being socially acceptable isn't the case, I think.
Mth@ZachWeinersmith Ciaphas Cain (40k flashman) is actually very likeable. At this point it seems more likely he has some kind of crazy imposter syndrome than is the fraud he (privately) claims to be.
Merovius@ZachWeinersmith Then again, LotR is pretty commonly criticized for Elves and Orcs being relatively thinly veiled racial stereotypes.
⁂ Fish Id Wardrobe@ZachWeinersmith I think that's more or less true as a starting point, but we don't really like that s**t in fantasy or SF now, either.
But moving away from that has spawned a lot of new subgenres.
Dave Wilburn 
@ZachWeinersmith I mean... so much of D&D is not-so-thinly-veiled explicit racism.
Dawn Tåke 🌙 
@ZachWeinersmith
I remember reading The Princess of Mars and thinking a paraphrase from Blues Brothers, "oh, we got both kinds of native. Noble AND savage!"
I remember reading The Princess of Mars and thinking a paraphrase from Blues Brothers, "oh, we got both kinds of native. Noble AND savage!"
Fabrice Tshimanga@ZachWeinersmith makes sense, but I'd add also that now those "otherness" can't be practically "othered" anyway.
Exotic places have been explored and colonized IRL, and thus normalized, people have entered (under cohercion) the Commonwealth and so on.
It's not just more polite, it would make much less sense even to the most ignorant and "anti-woke" Odysseus or Crusoe to explore whatever sea, island, or ocean.
Also, maybe much of the stories before the modern "realistic" novel have always been fantasy and sci-fi, in some way. Other genres are the actual exception. But mythology muddies the water...
Exotic places have been explored and colonized IRL, and thus normalized, people have entered (under cohercion) the Commonwealth and so on.
It's not just more polite, it would make much less sense even to the most ignorant and "anti-woke" Odysseus or Crusoe to explore whatever sea, island, or ocean.
Also, maybe much of the stories before the modern "realistic" novel have always been fantasy and sci-fi, in some way. Other genres are the actual exception. But mythology muddies the water...
Jon Sparks@ZachWeinersmith I think there's something in this, although there's plenty of classic SF that still perpetuates a White Saviour (Male) narrative. E.g. Poul Anderson's 'Virgin Planet' (1959) where a random male, not tagged as a muscle-man or warrior, arrives on a planet populated by cloned women, including a dedicated warrior caste — but still assumes he's 'the biggest, strongest, human on the planet'.
One of my early attempts at an SF novel was an attempt to do the scenario in a better way.
One of my early attempts at an SF novel was an attempt to do the scenario in a better way.
dontony@ZachWeinersmith this is why disney can't make Indiana Jones happen again.
Rick@ZachWeinersmith I always thought that line in Star Trek IV, that Kirk says about Spock, “Of all the souls I have encountered…his was the most…human,” was pretty racist.
🫡@ZachWeinersmith I think it's not just the offensiveness, I think if you try to make a story about exploring a secret place no one has ever heard of on earth its just automatically within the realm of sci fi or fantasy now. And you need a sci fi reason for why it hasn't already been discovered by people (ie. wakanda).
The other thing is you can in theory travel to whatever real life "exotic" place you can think of now and see real news from it every day.
JP@ZachWeinersmith I totally see this, but also SciFi particularly has mainstreamed *speculative* fiction; the “what if” that allows us to consider(/authors to inspire us to consider) the consequences of political/ethical/philosophical decisions we don’t have the framing to consider, even if we have the time. (eg. stuff like Black Mirror)
I feel like a greater % of story-consuming people today have time, headspace & context enough to consider “the future” beyond themselves than 100yrs ago.
chebra> Setting it among aliens or elves or whatever allows the same story, theoretically minus the dehumanizing.
so it's less dehumanizing when it's set among literal non-humans?
This sounds like it will just postpone the problem a couple of generations - somebody will be rewriting the stories again when we actually meet aliens.
HTTP 1.1/418 Teapot@ZachWeinersmith Oh, I'm quite sure that's a factor.
Chris Adamson@ZachWeinersmith @layoutSubviews The same way that “War of the Worlds” was a riff on a 19th Century UK genre of “invasion literature”, but this time the UK was invaded not by Germans but Martians.
Marc Etienne@ZachWeinersmith I think a bigger part is that authors who want to write historical fiction now need to know their history. Same with adventure locales: it isn't as easy any more to make up cultures in some remote areas of the planet any more, and if you do write about, say, the Congo you can't just make stuff up any more now that everyone has access to Wikipedia.
F&SF is free of those annoying pedants.
mathew@ZachWeinersmith This is my explanation for the glut of video games where you are battling zombies. They don't have consciousness because they're dead, so it's OK to commit mass murder against them.
I'm really discouraged by the fact that we still can't seem to get past "point gun at target, push fire button, repeat" as the main gameplay mechanic for what seems like the vast majority of games.
Rob Dover@ZachWeinersmith I've always thought the power of SF/F as a genre lies in how it allows an author to explore their topic of choice with as much or as little existing context as they choose. Ditching the baggage of the real world can make for much more interesting storytelling in the right hands!
@ZachWeinersmith But also you could argue that the 19th century was the aberration here, right? Throughout history people have used the fantastic to tell their stories (eg. the Pratchett argument that Fantasy is the oldest genre)
@ZachWeinersmith Space operas and world building tend to be long, but do buyers think they're getting their money's worth if the book is 150k words or 20 hrs of audio? I've read that publishers want at least 100k words in sci fi.