podcast friday

[sabotabby]

 Today's Podcast Friday is about the podcast Rite Gud.

Goddamn I love this podcast. I'm still catching up on back episodes but every one I've listened to is hilarious, insightful, and genuinely useful as both a sci-fi/fantasy reader and as a writer. You can probably click on any of them and if you like the title, you'll probably get a lot out of it. But of course the episode that you should listen to, if you choose one, is Squeecore, which launched them into The Discourse.

(If you're not a podcast person, you can read a transcript.)

"Squeecore" features host Raquel S. Benedict and JR from the Podhand, discussing what they argue is the predominant literary movement in speculative fiction. It's the thing I've been dubbing the YA-ification of genre fiction, though I will admit that Squeecore is much more catchy. The thesis is that a lot of SFF these days...kind of sucks? Even as it's theoretically more diverse, it's become more limited in terms of tonal and emotional range and particularly in terms of the class composition of writers. There's an unwillingness to deal with messy emotions and characters, a safety, and a liberalism (or, as the podcast asserts, a neoliberalism even while the authors are overwhelmingly left-wing). Particularly in short stories, there's an overriding moralism, as if readers can't be trusted to pick out nuance, and a narrowing of allowable outcomes and experiences.

This episode is a live hand grenade dropped into the conversation. It caused. So. Much. Drama. on Twitter, with a load of authors I really enjoy weighing in. Raquel got all kinds of hate (JR less so, because he's not a woman on the internet). They did a followup episode, "The Squee-quel", which talks about the backlash and expands on some of the ideas in the first one. 

Now, while there are positions on both sides of the debate that I respect, I do come down on the side of "this is a thing and I don't like it"—I've had this itch with so much of genre fiction that touches dark issues but doesn't really come to grips with the darkness. "Squeecore" is a Rorschach test in many ways—Raquel and JR don't name a lot of authors, but Scalzi and Wendig are in there, Joss Whedon carries a lot of the blame, and they assert that the problem is more prevalent in short fiction than in novels. Personally I was thinking of books like A Memory Called Empire and Victories Greater than Death where the central conceit in both cases involves a young lesbian who is happy to her memories overwritten by a different personality and is cool with it and we're supposed to be happy for her if it works. And everyone loses their mind over these books because yay representation uwu smol bean, etc. I also think that a lot of the prose is flat. Which is not a new problem in SFF—the Golden Age that everyone on the right of these debates romanticizes is practically unreadable—but it's a particular type of flatness that I associate with YA and it speaks to a failure of imagination and innovation in the genre. It's why when I read someone like Silvia Moreno-Garcia (who also weighed in on the debate, on the side that I agree with), I absolutely lose my shit because she clearly rejects a sharp division between literary fiction and genre fiction and proves that you can absolutely write a book about vampires or magic and not have it be a quippy, dialogue-heavy, barren story that seems written purely to be adapted for screen.

It's been a long time since the Sad Puppies (whose spectre is, of course, raised by this discourse) and I think SFF ought to be mature enough to have these debates.

Anyway, as a proponent of dense, messy fiction I really enjoyed this challenge and I just want to talk about it forever.

Comments

[ioplokon]

Interesting, I don't read a lot of sf/f but considering YA is the moneymaker, I wouldn't be shocked it has an influence. I'm interested in the topic so I skimmed the transcript but it's an odd one for me bc it's like just clearly subtweeting shit I know nothing about?

As for the broader conversation, at a certain point isn't this just an argument that, like, mass market fiction is written for the mass market? I also think this has to do with publicity/optimizing vs diversity of writers/characters. It reminds me of the conversation my friends and I have about wrestling & like, who is it for? The live audience? The people watching the stream at home? The people seeing gifs on Twitter? David Meltzer specifically? Anyway I think some blandness has to do with optimizing around shareability + is a reflection of that. The music industry has similar issues. Plus everyone creating now is kinda crushed under the weight of the past, which is all super accessible immediately.

Also, I am admittedly a bit of a crank about this, but the discussion of néolibéralisme feels a bit shallow. Like, I feel like they didn't make the whole argument here for how it connects specifically to the YA-like quality of the writing? Like is néolibéralisme ok if the books are better? (Plus like... I think then the history of néolibéral economics & the history of the YA genre kinda don't have perfectly aligned timelines. Idk I'm not saying there's nothing there but... I don't think this was super convincing?)

But see this is what I struggle with podcasts, I feel like everything jumped around a lot and I got a bit confused where they were going... This is probably my editor brain but like. I think they could have cut this down to like, 10-15 mins... But I know that's a non-optimal podcast length.

Anyway ultimately I hit a similar place here that I do with film. Creating and publishing is easier now than ever before. So there are plenty of good works out there - to me the question is more about, how do we find ways of supporting & funding the art we want to see.

[sabotabby]

I think this study is an interesting argument for "yes, mass market things have always been a bit shit, but there is quantifiably less variety now than there used to be." I do look askance when I see an implication that any kind of media was better back in the day, because it clearly isn't, but I don't think that's what they're arguing here or in that link. I'd argue that in SF/F now, there is more objectively better writing available now than there was, say, 50 years ago, by a much greater diversity and quality of writers—the issue is largely whether it's getting critical acclaim, money, and distribution. Which is an economic and cultural problem.

YA is relatively new as a marketing category, so I think its influence merits a lot of analysis. The generation writing SF/F now might be among the first to not have gone from reading children's books to adult books without a large body of literature in between.

I've been advised that if you want to get signed to a major press for genre writing, you have to be pitching it as something that could be adapted for a screen, and I think that's really new and has to do with thinner budgets and consolidation of the Big Four publishers. Which, of course, drastically limits the type of stories that can be told.

[honigfrosch]

I've been advised that if you want to get signed to a major press for genre writing, you have to be pitching it as something that could be adapted for a screen

Oh, crap.

[sabotabby]

It's okay, I've made my peace with it and committed to writing unfilmable weird fiction for micropresses.

[ioplokon]

Thanks, that helps. I'd take some heart as the book industry at least seems a bit noisier than the others (which makes sense bc lower barrier to entry). And it doesn't hurt that they agree with my overall conclusion. :P

And ah yes how could I forget 'future rights holders' in my who's-this-for list? Yet again a big discussion in wrestling (and sports) bc as you shift from making money off the gate to making money off broadcast/library rights, it becomes more about, what kind of program do high-paying advertisers want (one that appeals to white college-educated men under 40, a demo that is obsessively tracked). I think film & books are a bit less depressing here bc the ad situation isn't the same as tv.

But yeah, seems like books aren't quite as bad as film, tv, music, video games. Yet. So this really is the time to get to work. One thing I do (in addition to just buying from small presses) is request my library buy books. I've had pretty good success there & all the ones they bought also had at least a 2-month wait-list on publication. I think we also need to figure out the ebook problem. Bc I think that kindle is a big driver toward consolidation. But obviously this is a hard one. I know medium presses have some success with drm-free or watermarked but I assume it's not viable at smaller levels or everyone would do it.

[sabotabby]

I have been trying to get my head around the ebook problem for years. Because if something is infinitely reproducible, all attempts to put a market value on it are inherently doomed to failure. But artists still need to get paid, or only rich people will make art.

Amazon has been absolute shit for publishing. It just decimated all independent booksellers and publishers. When I worked in publishing, Chapters-Indigo was in the process of massacring all mid-level publishing in Canada and then Amazon came along and shot the survivors in the head.

[ioplokon]

Yeah, I think the main answer so far has been to Be Your Own Brand, so what you're really selling is access/the relationship with fans/followers. Which does work for some people but it's inefficient & requires a huge amount of input (plus tends to favor low-quality, frequent output over more deliberate projects). I try to support on the publisher level for small presses/collectives bc I think that's more democratic and sustainable than focusing on individual authors. But there you still have issues with cliques & exclusion.

[sabotabby]

Absolutely. My little clique is trying to do its own thing with an artist collective, and we've discovered that it's such an unusual thing that people generally have no idea what we're on about. Even though it is IMO a great idea, especially as no one has much interest in being a brand or writing anything particularly commercial. But this is, at best, the community garden of publishing.