3 ms·
That's truly a pity. At the risk of sounding insufferable, whenever I read a "modern" book I feel like I immediately can tell where it's going and how it ends.
by nineplay 5y ago
That's truly a pity. At the risk of sounding insufferable, whenever I read a "modern" book I feel like I immediately can tell where it's going and how it ends. It's the reason I spend most of my time with my nose in golden-age scifi.
I suspect "We can't connect to Bangladeshi characters" is shorthand for "We only want plucky white women who overcome hardships". Ug.
- jfengel 5y agoI find that I can absolutely tell where golden-age sci-fi is going. I loved it when I was much younger, but today it feels "thin". Partly it's because they invented the tropes; after all, Hamlet is just a string of cliches. But partly it's because I know the writers, even the ones I've never read. They come from a really narrow range of social backgrounds. The great stuff is still great, but that's mostly survivorship bias, and I've long since read all the survivors. Finding good new books is still damn hard. Sturgeon's Law was, and remains, in full force. And the unpredictability is not always an advantage: the predictability of those sci-fi books is very comfortable. If I really didn't know what I was getting into I'd have to work a lot harder, and I often don't want to.