12/23/25: at war with the homework doers

The problems with fantasy and science fiction right now are the problems of publishing in general. There are two aspects, and both intertwine material/capital and cultural problems.

The first problem. Mainstream publishing is more centralized than ever before. SimonSchusterPenguinRandomhouse owns a third of the market (the other two-thirds are Amazon, which is a problem of a different sort but still a problem of monopoly). This problem also applies to much smaller mainstream SFF specialty publishers (ie, Tor). Risk aversion. Huge conglomerates are fundamentally conservative and scifi + fantasy are not conservative forms, aesthetically speaking. Don't get me wrong, a lot of very good sff stories have conservative or reactionary politics at their core, and a lot of writers and readers have relationships to the genre that could be characterized as conservative (ie, the obsession with cataloguing and seeking out familiar tropes rather than searching for new and compelling stories). But in terms of aesthetics and story possibilities - in other words, in abstract - sff is a wild field with many possibilities. Corporations are conservative in operation and refuse the risk of genuinely wild fantasy. The cultural piece is that they engage in a feedback loop with risk-averse, pseudo-conservative, trope-happy readers. Both parties want the sure thing: corpos want ROI and are allergic to the New and Weird; readers want to be comforted rather than challenged, and are not allergic but certainly resistant to the New and Weird.

So that's one problem.

The other problem is that bourgeois capture of publishing in a cultural sense is complete. A lot of people get mixed up on this question and think the conflict is one of Woke vs Anti-Woke/Unwoke, or the problem is one of Progressive vs Conservative. This is a distraction and an aspect of bourgeois culture war, not reality. The conflict is class conflict.

Most professional, working new writers are bourgeois. They are middle class or better. They have post-secondary education. They are precocious in the adolescent sense, which is to say they strike me as people who probably did well in school, did their homework. Being precocious is fine as an adolescent but as an adult this disposition makes one stunted and cowardly. These precocious adults, these homework doers, are obsessed with approval from authority. They need a good grade. They want to outdo their peers not with iconoclastic thought but by being the most approved-of.

These people, being educated bourgeois, are, by and large, liberals. (I am not a liberal & also not a conservative. I am an anti-individualist anarchist with strong criticisms of liberalism from that standpoint. My antiliberalism is not from a right-wing perspective; do not misconstrue me on this point). The bourgeois liberals that make up the Professional Class are incredibly anxious people. They are obsessed with their anxiety. They have climate anxiety. They have social anxiety. They talk about this a lot. They are medicated. For now, we won't talk about how incongruent it is to talk about your social anxiety all the time while also being a shameless social climber.

What they don't talk about but you can observe in action are their other, more insidious anxieties. They are anxious about status, as all bourgeois are. They are competitive and back-stabby. Their parents have pushed them toward prosperous careers, so if they want to be an artist, they are anxious to succeed in a way that reads as success to their bourgeois parents. They are besieged by a constant moral anxiety, terrified of doing or saying (mostly saying) the wrong thing, going against status quo liberal shibboleths. They feel morally superior while feeling guilty about their class position (so they resent actual working class people, and, despite often claiming to be Marxists or socialists or "leftists," cannot handle the fact that, as Marx & Engels articulated, the working class is largely reactionary). This makes them deeply conservative because, in their liberalism, their progressivism, their claimed leftist positions, they are terrified of stepping outside the bounds of what is acceptable to their milieu.

As artists they are cowardly and boring.

The bourgeois, PMC liberal with a good education is not a good artist for two reasons:
1. They are fundamentally unserious artists because their artistic practice is subordinate to their anxieties as articulated above. They have to be a "good person" and their success only counts if it fits terms dictated by authority (publishing industry, parents, finances, being able to write without a day job).
2. Seemingly contradictory to this unseriousness, they are too serious and incapable of having fun. They are too anxious and afraid, for their status, their moral standing, etc.

The bourgois professional writer cannot cut loose. They cannot give themselves to their art and let it pour out and just be what it is going to be. They believe too much in a kind of dumbed down utilitarianism in art.

How are you supposed to let your own art run wild and free when you just spent your whole afternoon on twitter cataloguing all the ways in which JK Rowling is a bad person for her feminist positions and also a bad artist (and person) because of all the racist dog-whistles in Harry Potter? If you let yourself off the leash, you might make art that could be picked apart and condemned in the same way. So you have to make sure your own art is sewn up tight and adheres to all your professed values (and not your actual unspoken internal values, hence: the turmoil of cognitive dissonance). The stuff with the house elves is weird and embarrassing. You don't want to do something similar by accident. Remember what happened to Isabel Fall? You must control your artistic output.

This is cowardice.

I am a big believer in Han's Arp's view: "Men create art like a tree gives fruit." A tree is not anxious about growing fruit and does not think about, second guess, or analyze its fruit. It just makes it, silently.

The best fantasy right now is by self-published authors. I don't remember the last time Tor released a book that I was excited to read, except for a couple things that have come out through the Nightfire imprint. I don't think I've read a sf book released in the last 15 years by one of the big three that was not absolute dogshit. I take SFWA membership as a red flag (and not just because of all the pedophilia, though that also is a major factor). Someone with the courage to self-publish is someone with the courage to do what they are compelled to do without the cosign of authority. Self-publishers write out of joy and need, and are willing to stand on their own work, alone.

So the answer is not the childish conservative bullshit of "these writers are too Woke and it's ruining science fiction/fantasy! We need to go back to good old fashioned adventure storytelling!" This is its own brand of cowardice, of fear of the new and strange. And it is incredibly boring and played out.

Writers should strive to embarrass themselves, to betray themselves, to take the risk of revealing things, in their art, that they did not know were inside them. And they should be willing, stylistically, to strike out on a big swing.

The answer is not be liberal or be conservative or be woke or don't.

The answer is: fruit.

Read this great piece about Thomas Covenant by Lisa Kuznak.