Minor drug-fueled rant incoming.

But can we stop with the wholesale dismissal of dystopian fiction? I'm seeing this most often, quite frankly, from reviewers & fans of significant privilege -- white, male, whatever -- who yearn for a return to fiction as uplifting escapism.

They want utopias. OK. Go write some. Have fun. But some of us, goddamn it, need catharsis right now. We need fiction that acknowledges what we've been going through, and posits means of resistance rather than mere escape. There is *nothing* lazy or tiresome about this.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to write through trauma? To imagine resistance against massive technological & systemic odds? "It's all over and things are better now" is easy. We've done that, to death. I need something more honest.

We've had fifty or sixty years of SFF that imagines bright futures (for some) without engaging with *how we get there* or just how massive the obstacles we have to overcome, are. I get that that's the genre tradition. But that was never utopia -- just denial.

I'm just really sick of seeing calls for "hopepunk," etc. because *some* people are tired of thinking about how terrible the world is now. Newsflash: it's been terrible for everybody else for generations. Y'all can suck it up and read about fighting back for a decade or two.

::crawls back under blanket and lap cat::

OK, belated clarification. This is why you don't rant on drugs, kids. But I shouldn't have mentioned "hopepunk," bc I'm still not sure what that is and it's not really what I'm talking about. Utopian visions of the future, which have dominated SFF for much of its lifetime, are.

And again, I'm not saying utopian visions shouldn't exist. Nothing wrong with escapism. My complaint is about people who yearn for these things while disparaging the current dystopian trend. Nothing wrong with fight-back fiction, too, is all I'm saying.