We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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I suspect a lot of readers probably don't distinguish that much between these genres, but "fantasy" is the popular, cool thing nowadays (among geeks who actually read books) so that's the word to vote for even if a lot of the stuff they read and like is probably actually science fiction (which is old and fusty from the perception of a lot of these same readers). There will probably eventually be a renaissance of hard SF (it may in progress already) and a few years from now a lot of people will get into it and distance themselves from fantasy, which they will see as a bunch of magical hokum. But they're really just two flavors of the same thing.
I don't know if hard SF is going to rise to the front. I think the vast majority of readers are less interested in accurate science or the kinds of books that tend to fit within hard SF, at least from what I've seen among readers young and old. They go to fantasy because it doesn't require exterior knowledge (and other reasons too, which are not bad ones, by the way).
But, who knows. Nobody really ever expects things to explode when they do…predicting literary trends is pretty much impossible.