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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Literary vs. Genre Fiction: The Line? (Part Four)
Reading Time
[The second to last piece in the series. You can read the previous pieces at the following links: Part One; Part Two; Part Three.]
4. What are some common myths that people have about genre fiction in general?
I probably should have stuck #3 and #4 together, since this post is going to seem slightly anticlimactic. Regardless, Delmater makes both a false and a correct assertion about the myths about science fiction and its connection to television and film. I’ll tackle the latter first.
Delmater begins her 4th true point (since the 5th is actually a short, but hopeful explanation about Abyss & Apex‘s purpose and, thus, has nothing to do with this series of posts) by saying that “Hollywood tends to simplify good science fiction or fantasy stories and rely heavily on special effects.” I’ve said as much before (oh, look, an Avatar link again), but what is most striking to me about this problem is that there seems to be very little reason for doing so, except, perhaps, to cut costs everywhere possible. Not every high-brow science fiction film has flopped at the box office–quite the opposite, in fact. In the last few years we’ve seen films like Inception and District 9 come out on top, both in the “serious” department and among science fiction viewers. The same is also true of other genres, such as fantasy (hello Lord of the Rings) or horror (The Sixth Sense or The Exorcist–to name an oldie). There simply isn’t a reason to produce garbage as far as I can see. But maybe Hollywood has insight into things that I don’t, because it continues to produce a combination of both forms, with the less adequate form dominating the slots.
But Delmater also makes two rather interesting points:
guy with a lens flare…
As for the second point, I think Delmater is trying to place genre film in the same category as SF literature a la Margaret Atwood’s comments about the genre. Very few people are unwilling to admit that something like The Dresden Files (Delmater’s example) is fantasy, or that Battlestar Galactica is science fiction. Some viewers might not know what SF or F are (or they might have odd definitions for both genres), but that is a separate issue from refusing to acknowledge that something is SF or F when obviously it is. The film world is remarkably more open than the literature world. Why? Because without genre fiction, film would not be what it is today: one of the most lucrative entertainment industries in human history. Science fiction films have changed the game numerous times in film’s short history (2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, and even Avatar); it will continue to change the game as technology improves and filmmakers experiment.
And that concludes my short series on the literary vs. genre fiction line. I hope you enjoyed them!
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A Reading List of Dystopian Fiction and Relevant Texts (Apropos of Nothing in Particular)
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Duke’s Best EDM Tracks of 2024
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2025: The Year of Something
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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