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 Write Genre Fiction” — Damn You, Dirty Phrase!
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Sam Sykes has a great post about how fantasy fans internalize the belief that the genre defaults to crap. I implore you to read it. It’s good. Really.
And it’s because of Sam that I’m writing about the phrase in the title above. Only, I’m coming at it from a different angle. I’m not talking about the belief that good fantasy novels are exceptions, not the general rule (in part because I have no idea what “good” means in this context). What I’m talking about is the feeling I get when people ask me what I write.
By “people” I typically mean “MFAs at my university.” Somehow the fact that I am a writer on the path towards publication has spread through rumor in my university. I’ve probably mentioned my writer status somewhere before, and so people I’m friends with on Facebook simply know. Regardless of why these folks know I am a genre writer, in conversation with them, the question that often springs up is “what do you write?”. From there, I tend to get sheepish about the whole genre thing. If I bring it up — “I write genre fiction” — it is either said with a hint that I’m not terribly proud of it, or some vain attempt to qualify my statement with nonsense like “I write literary and adventure SF.” None of these presentations makes me particularly proud.
And now that I’ve read Sam Sykes’ take on how readers adopt this attitude about their favorite genre, I think there needs to be a break in my own little world. I’m done with being ashamed and afraid to say what I do. No more.
Saying “I write genre fiction” isn’t a bad thing. And to anyone who thinks it is, well, fuck you. I write genre fiction. I’m proud of that fact. I love genre fiction. Most people love genre fiction, even if they won’t admit it to themselves. Those people should be ashamed of saying things like “I like Star Wars, but that’s because I grew up on it; I’m not into that stuff anymore” or “well, that book isn’t really genre; it’s literary.” Fuck that. It is genre fiction. It’s also literary. So what? It can be both. It’s also perfectly fine to like Star Wars AND the recently-released John Carter, or Star Trek (new and old) and Game of Thrones (the books and the show). Celebrate it. Love it.
And if you write the stuff, don’t do what I’ve done for far too long: cower at the prospect of having to justify yourself to someone who “doesn’t write that genre trash.” You should throw off the shackles of shame and flip your figurative middle finger off at anyone who scoffs at what you love to do. Fuck’em.
This is genre. Hear us roar.
Or something like that…
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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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