Today, it was declared that all authors of genre fiction are monsters.*
The rational goes thusly:
- We live in an unjust world.
- Science fiction and fantasy allow us to escape, if only temporarily, from that world.
- If we spend time escaping from that world, we are not fighting injustice, and therefore, we are complicit in that injustice.
- Conclusion: those who help us escape are monsters.
Now, all monsters must be found and destroyed; otherwise, how will creatures of virtue sleep at night? We ought to call for the immediate destruction of all genre fiction and its creators, but—
That would let those villains off much too easy.
No. No. They must repair the damage they have done.
Let people escape, have they? Those fiends. They must atone.
They must build cages.
By decree, from this day forth:
All genre fiction must clip the wings of the imagination!
Every work of genre fiction must needs pause at appropriate moments to remind you that the dishes need doing, the bed won’t make itself, and your day job (or your central planning committee, or the leader of your religious or spiritual organization) has expectations, and you’d best get off your tail and get back to as much drudgery as you can find.
Happy endings should be amended to, “Of course, this was totally unrealistic, and won’t work for you, so don’t think about it, buster,” and sad ones should be emphasized with simple clarity: “See? THIS. THIS IS WHAT YOU GET. THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT.”
The moral of every story should be “…but all this airy-fairy stuff was totally unrealistic, and basically a bunch of horse-pucky”.
Your spaceships are hereby grounded, and your Pegasi officially have agoraphobia.
All flights of fancy deserve to end in only one place: the Bermuda Triangle of the imagination.
Happy landings.
____
* So:
Ordinarily, I put some more information about myself at the bottom of my stories. I also don’t usually satirize Real Life (whatever that might be) quite so directly.
The actual statement was that all readers and writers of genre fiction are fascists, but I secretly substitute “monsters” for that word on a regular basis. Don’t tell.
As an important note (not that I expect this article to get tremendous traffic, but it’s still something worth mentioning)—I am including the tweet which drew me in, which, in turn, names the original poster. If you know any of my work, you know that I very much do not want anyone to use this as a reason to attack either of these folks. Rather, I firmly believe that we live in an entirely ridiculous age, and one of the things which has made it quite so painfully surreal is that we’ve (at least) two horrible, and complimentary, bad habits: we forget the past, and we see the present without context.
So, for future readers, should you happen upon this piece: Yes, the stuff below happened. And it’s insane; but it’s not one individual‘s insanity. It’s part of a larger madness, one we could likely prevent—if we choose to recognize that demonizing each other doesn’t help us cast out demons; it just makes more of them.
But you oughtn’t listen to me.
After all, I’m a monster.
You'll be shocked to discover that everyone who reads and writes genre fiction, NO EXCEPTIONS, is a fascist.
— JenReadsRomance (@JenReadsRomance) October 21, 2019
