Oh my god! Are you me? Did I write this? I couldn't have, because I haven't read The Powers of the Earth, but this is so exactly how I feel about genre fiction. Thank you for putting my feelings into words. Thank for you for suggesting this book.
My personal favorite SciFi series in recent years is Galaxies Edge by Anspach and Cole. Clearly their politics hang out in books, but honestly it's a good upgrade to the concept of Star Wars. (I say that as a life long Star Wars fan.) This is military sci fi and a compelling upgrade to SW. - Also I'd note that they do back burner the politics over time and let the story reign.
I also enjoyed the Ember War for it's question: what is a human? While I disagree philosophically, the series caused me to think about the question from a different perspective. That makes for an enjoyable book.
Good write up, I will have to grab a copy, thanks.
For hardish sci-fi fantasy, a good recent example is Shad Brooks’ “Shadow of the Conqueror.” It is really well thought out, all the implications of the magic system, leading to many clever “aha!” Moments where details in the rules are used to deal with novel situations etc. It is quite satisfying. I haven’t reread it yet, but I enjoyed it the first time.
I can't believe you didn't mention the very best lunar anarchist political essay disguised as a novel, Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, which this book strikes me as a reaction to much more than the Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Le Guin's moon is communo-anarchist, rather than the capitalist type).
Le Guin does a remarkably *mature* look at this world, including its flaws and tradeoffs and the infuriating types of people who would crop up within it, so glad to see that persists here.
If it means anything, it changed my life and my relationship with everyone around me, in ways that feel increasingly relevant as I increase in authority (both in a professional and parental capacity).
It's not the kind of political view where you write to your local representative to pass some law; it addresses politics in the purest sense, at the person to person, citizen to citizen level. You, justifiably, might not even want the kind of society described, but I found it an illuminating lens to look on the relationships of power in my own life.
Le Guin was not a physicist, though, so one needs to forgive her there...
Is the divergence of publishing between professional and self-published the most extreme of the longhouse/gooncave phenomena in the public sphere today? But strangely, I barely hear complaints about this, and if a veiled complaint is aired it's never paired with a solution. Sometimes I do drivebys through the fantasy shelves of bookstores looking for new releases to read, and the hit rate just keeps dropping. Anything unexpectedly good nowadays is self-published, only perhaps not as good as it could have been if only self-publication had some minimum requirements against self-indulgence. Personally, the sad state of genre fiction today annoys and affects me more than the silly donkey vs elephant cheerleading which is written about endlessly (more than half serious).
Speculation: it isn't complained about because people who might complain fall into two categories:
- I tried and failed to be published, at which point I don't feel disinterested/confident enough to make the complaint. People will say it's just sour grapes.
- I never tried to be published, which means I don't really notice, except as a vague sense of bookstore culture drift that mirrors all other media culture drift.
I will say that I took a shot at publishing a children's book, knowing it was genuinely not good enough for publication, but what the heck, might as well try, and by the time I'd read the twentieth About page for a literary agent, I was very sure that nineteen of those twenty would comfortably reject exactly who you'd expect them to reject.
What we need to complete the picture is a book about a bunch of Stalinists escaping an Earth ravaged by state collapse and corporate-enforced anarcho-tyranny in order to build socialism in one country on the Moon. Someone write that and finally we can sort out whose ideology is better once and for all.
Oh my god! Are you me? Did I write this? I couldn't have, because I haven't read The Powers of the Earth, but this is so exactly how I feel about genre fiction. Thank you for putting my feelings into words. Thank for you for suggesting this book.
My personal favorite SciFi series in recent years is Galaxies Edge by Anspach and Cole. Clearly their politics hang out in books, but honestly it's a good upgrade to the concept of Star Wars. (I say that as a life long Star Wars fan.) This is military sci fi and a compelling upgrade to SW. - Also I'd note that they do back burner the politics over time and let the story reign.
I also enjoyed the Ember War for it's question: what is a human? While I disagree philosophically, the series caused me to think about the question from a different perspective. That makes for an enjoyable book.
Good write up, I will have to grab a copy, thanks.
For hardish sci-fi fantasy, a good recent example is Shad Brooks’ “Shadow of the Conqueror.” It is really well thought out, all the implications of the magic system, leading to many clever “aha!” Moments where details in the rules are used to deal with novel situations etc. It is quite satisfying. I haven’t reread it yet, but I enjoyed it the first time.
I can't believe you didn't mention the very best lunar anarchist political essay disguised as a novel, Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, which this book strikes me as a reaction to much more than the Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Le Guin's moon is communo-anarchist, rather than the capitalist type).
Le Guin does a remarkably *mature* look at this world, including its flaws and tradeoffs and the infuriating types of people who would crop up within it, so glad to see that persists here.
Believe it or not, I haven’t actually read it. I am woefully deficient in my classic sci-fi. But it’s on the (very long) list.
If it means anything, it changed my life and my relationship with everyone around me, in ways that feel increasingly relevant as I increase in authority (both in a professional and parental capacity).
It's not the kind of political view where you write to your local representative to pass some law; it addresses politics in the purest sense, at the person to person, citizen to citizen level. You, justifiably, might not even want the kind of society described, but I found it an illuminating lens to look on the relationships of power in my own life.
Le Guin was not a physicist, though, so one needs to forgive her there...
Is the divergence of publishing between professional and self-published the most extreme of the longhouse/gooncave phenomena in the public sphere today? But strangely, I barely hear complaints about this, and if a veiled complaint is aired it's never paired with a solution. Sometimes I do drivebys through the fantasy shelves of bookstores looking for new releases to read, and the hit rate just keeps dropping. Anything unexpectedly good nowadays is self-published, only perhaps not as good as it could have been if only self-publication had some minimum requirements against self-indulgence. Personally, the sad state of genre fiction today annoys and affects me more than the silly donkey vs elephant cheerleading which is written about endlessly (more than half serious).
Speculation: it isn't complained about because people who might complain fall into two categories:
- I tried and failed to be published, at which point I don't feel disinterested/confident enough to make the complaint. People will say it's just sour grapes.
- I never tried to be published, which means I don't really notice, except as a vague sense of bookstore culture drift that mirrors all other media culture drift.
I will say that I took a shot at publishing a children's book, knowing it was genuinely not good enough for publication, but what the heck, might as well try, and by the time I'd read the twentieth About page for a literary agent, I was very sure that nineteen of those twenty would comfortably reject exactly who you'd expect them to reject.
What we need to complete the picture is a book about a bunch of Stalinists escaping an Earth ravaged by state collapse and corporate-enforced anarcho-tyranny in order to build socialism in one country on the Moon. Someone write that and finally we can sort out whose ideology is better once and for all.