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| Woke-ify Your Fiction – by Frank J Fleming |
| 2018-04-03 |
| At Sarah Hoyt's blog A good rule for writing science fiction and fantasy these days: If it’s not woke, it’s putting people to sleep. The key now is being socially conscious. Most people are regular conscious ‐ reactive to basic stimuli like sight, sound, small rocks being thrown at them ‐ but the more pertinent thing to be is socially conscious ‐ reactive to microaggressions and the racism and bigotry that undercut all human activity. And if you want people to buy your fiction these days, it needs to reflect that social consciousness ‐ as tedious as that all sounds. I know some are resistant to this idea. You’ve probably heard this quote: "Why do I have to worry about all this political stuff? Can’t I just write fun stories everyone will enjoy?" You know who said that? That’s right: Adolf Hitler. A lot of people don’t want to confront how closed and exclusive science fiction and fantasy have been throughout history. H.G. Wells spent a whole chapter of The Time Machine making explicit that in the future there would no longer be Irishmen. And when J. R. R. Tolkien ever had a woman do something useful in one of his stories, he always had to follow that with a note that this was a fantasy and would not happen in real life. And were later authors like Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke any better? I’m honestly asking; their books look very long, and I haven’t read them. But you need to be better than that if you want to write today. You need to Woke-ifyâ„¢ your fiction if you want to reach today’s readers. And I’m here to tell you how to do that. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #1 I don't read fiction to be preached at, by anyone. All I want is for the author to tell a good, internally consistent story. If you can't do that, then I'm happy to stop reading and toss the book. |
| Posted by: Silentbrick 2018-04-03 21:17 |