Thread by @aliettedb

Evening thoughts, half-formed: SFF is a genre where it's super tempting to say that smth is original/groundbreaking. But anytime we want to say "oh why are we not seeing more of this" we should be careful that the *this* may have been done already & we might just not have seen it

This is going to be a bit rambling but: I've seen erasure happen in real time. Women, POCs, queer folks, other marginalised people get dropped from the history of the genre (and by "history" it's anything from "20 years ago to 2 years ago").

Dominant folks tend to socialise with each other, recommend each other & remember each other (and obv you can be dominant in one way and not in another which means I'm not immune either!). But the more dominant, the more weight recs have are, which means vicious circle situation

But also I think we end up placing too much value on groundbreaking? It's not only the ideas that matter, it's what we do with them. Something need not be unique and earth shattering to matter.

And obv you never quite know which books are going to inspire other books, and it's not necessarily the "groundbreaking" ones that stick around that way.

I'm also very very much aware that "groundbreaking" disproportionately gets applied to books by dominant folks.

As @Llyfrgell_Babel & @tithenai point out, this paradigm of successive revolutions in genre disproportionately lionises a few books as the Ones (most by dominant folk) rather than emphasising continuity of change & conversations in genre. It's cult of individual applied to books

So what to do about this? Stepping away from the framework matters, I think (which is why series like @bogiperson's Quiltbag+ Speculative Classics and eir showcase of authors on own website are super important: bogireadstheworld.com
tor.com/tag/quiltbag-s…)

I think we all have a responsibility as readers and promoters of things, and the more dominant we are the more responsibility we have. What we do with our own individual recommendations space matters. It's up to us to lift the marginalised, the erased, the ignored.

The 1st person who tries to tell me "but what about the fun/the quality" is going to get flamed, because the very *notion* that non-dominant stuff is less fun/less worthy is a classic erasure tactic
(spoilers: it's generally better because it has to be, being at disadvantage)

Do we have to do this?
No one is forcing us to, no. But we're a genre that prides itself on being welcoming and inclusive--don't we want everyone to have a seat at the table? (I do!)

Anyway this is going viral apparently so let me stop and get some dinner ?
If you enjoy what I'm saying and want to support me, I have books!
subterraneanpress.com/the-tea-master…
amazon.co.uk/Tea-Master-Det…