podcast friday
May. 6th, 2022 07:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2022-05-08 11:58 am (UTC)