{"id":88803,"date":"2026-03-20T01:00:53","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T05:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=88803"},"modified":"2026-03-19T10:15:45","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T14:15:45","slug":"qotd-the-lameness-and-sameness-of-modern-science-fiction-novels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/03\/20\/qotd-the-lameness-and-sameness-of-modern-science-fiction-novels\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The lameness and sameness of modern science fiction novels"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I’ll confess, though: I almost didn’t read this book. Actually, for several years I didn’t. I was vaguely aware of its existence, but I’d pretty much stopped reading new speculative fiction because I finally admitted to myself that it was pure masochism that kept me beating my head against the wall of newly-published extruded genre product<\/a> when I had sixty-plus years of Hugo and Nebula nominees to choose from. Sure, every novel will reflect something of its age’s concerns (there’s a lot of nuclear war in those old Hugo winners!), but it’s gotten much worse in the last ten or fifteen years: every book that gets any buzz is so deeply inflected with questions of personal liberation from oppressive structures, so little nuanced and so obsessed with identity and representation, that I find it borderline unreadable. A few books like that, done well \u2014 fine, that’s part of life, that’s certainly a kind of story you can tell. But when it’s everything<\/em>, when it becomes a precondition for publication, you’re left with a tragically denuded sample of the human experience. It’s not that I don’t want to read a book where I disagree with the underlying politics, it’s that an unsubtle obsession with the “correct” politics makes a book boring and cringe. One-dimensionally “right-wing” fiction written in reaction to the contemporary mainstream is just as bad \u2014 worse, perhaps, because if done well it’s the sort of thing I would really enjoy.1<\/sup><\/p>\n

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Powers of the Earth<\/em>, by Travis J.I. Corcoran”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf<\/em><\/a>, 2024-04-29.<\/p>\n

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    \n
  1. There’s nothing worse than poor execution of an incredible idea, because it means no one else will come along and do the incredible idea right<\/strong>. Austin Grossman’s Crooked<\/strong>, for instance, is Richard Nixon vs. Cosmic Horrors, which is a brilliant premise (yes, the Interstate Highway System is definitely an eldritch sigil designed to protect America, I will not accept any argument) but falls apart on the totally ahistorical version of our 37th President designed to justify making him the “good guy”. The real Nixon is such a fascinating and compelling figure \u2014 why not keep him as weird and twitchy and striving as he actually was and have him be the good guy anyway?<\/em><\/li>\n

    Or, say, the Napoleon<\/strong> movie. <\/em><\/p>\n<\/ol>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I’ll confess, though: I almost didn’t read this book. Actually, for several years I didn’t. I was vaguely aware of its existence, but I’d pretty much stopped reading new speculative fiction because I finally admitted to myself that it was pure masochism that kept me beating my head against the wall of newly-published extruded genre […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,53,41],"tags":[622,351,1533,85],"class_list":["post-88803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-ideology","tag-politicalcorrectness","tag-psmithreviews","tag-sf"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-n6j","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88803"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88803\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101427,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88803\/revisions\/101427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}