Waldman's book review in the New Yorker got me thinking about genre trends in narrative and about how much of what they feel fiction has lost is still held sacred in Science Fiction & Fantasy. https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/has-self-awareness-gone-too-far-in-fiction/amp

In their review of Dolan’s EXCITING TIMES, they wonder, “has self-awareness gone too far in fiction” when fiction often suggests that “lip service equals resistance.” They worry about our ability to be better when we cast “self-awareness as a finish line, not a starting point.”

And, in the middle of a global pandemic, economic downturn, and with many feeling crises of faith in their democratic institutions alongside the stark realization that the world is grossly unequal, Waldman is right.

There is shallow comfort to be found in fiction telling us how to cope with a life lived within the barbed boundaries of a social and political world that has been revealed to be almost undeniably broken, but, then again, that’s not what all fiction does.

Though Science Fiction and Fantasy works are rarely offered the same platforms for consideration and thought that the New Yorker and Waldman offer in their review, it is exactly these works that meet the moment in which we find ourselves.

SFF is often about stories where something is wrong with the world and then, instead of capitulating to the implied impossibility of systemic change in order to make the best of life within the wrongness, SFF tends to ask more. It demands that its people challenge the wrongness.

Instead of lessons about coping with blithe or blatant evil, SFF asks us to fight and defeat it (or fail trying). And, just maybe, we’d be a bit better off if more of those stories, & their ideas about living in broken worlds, were broadly welcomed as thoughtful fiction too.