When Literary Diversity Vanishes Up Its Own Arse

Statistical Evidence of Cultural Doom

The release from Goodreads seemed innocuous enough: 105 of the Buzziest Debut Novels of the New Year - Goodreads News & Interviews it said, and I, though having become a hardened cynic about such things over the span of my several decades in the writing biz, began swiping through the list, admittedly without much hope I would find anything I might want to read. While my lack of hope turned out to be justified, as I ground my way through titles like River Sing Me Home by Eleanor Shearer, described as:

Rare. Moving. Powerful. This beautiful, page-turning and redemptive story of a mother's gripping journey across the Caribbean to find her stolen children in the aftermath of slavery is a remarkable…

…bore, I thought to myself, and kept scrolling.

The Unfortunates by J.K. Chukwu, about which I am informed:

An edgy, bitingly funny debut about a queer, half-Nigerian college sophomore who, enraged and exhausted by the racism at her elite college, sets out to find truth about The Unfortunates—the unlucky subset of Black undergrads who have been mysteriously dying…

Hmph. Unimpressive, I think, considering that you can hardly make your way across a dead tree book mausoleum these days, (assuming you can find one) without having to clamber over mounds of edgy, bitingly funny debut novels about queer, half-Nigerian college sophomores enraged and exhausted by racism.

This sort of thing remained more or less constant throughout the rest of the list, with the only thing that seemed to stand out being the names of the authors themselves. Delia Cai. The above-mentioned J.K. Chukwu. Maria Dong, (pause for a guilty snigger - yes, I must be better than that). Kashana Cauley. Parini Shroff. Fatin Abbas. Jamila Minnicks, who won the “2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.” Of course she did. Kyla Zhao. Iris Yamashita. Are you beginning to see a trend here? No? Okay, continuing. Oindrila Mukherjee. Selby Wynn Schwartz (“The first thing we did was change our names. We were going to be Sappho…”). DK Nnuro…punctuation after the first two letters, as initials, or unpunctuated, as a single, perhaps quite glottal, expectoration? The sources disagree. Onward.

Chetna Maroo. Heinz Insu Fenkl. Asale Angel-Ajani (Lara navigates what it means to be the Black, biracial daughter of a Russian mother…). Priya Guns, who gets a nice Twitter blurb from one Weike Wang. (Must…restrain…myself). Nazli Koca (A singular debut from “an important and radical new literary voice,” The Applicant explores with wit and brevity what it means to be an immigrant, woman, and emerging writer). Sadly for her, while she may be “radical,” I suspect she’s going to have to move to the rear of the line with her meaning of being an immigrant woman stuff, though. It’s just not competitive in today’s high standards grievance markets. Esther Yi.

Jinwoo Chong (FLUX is a haunting and sometimes shocking exploration of…the pervasive nature of whiteness within the development of Asian identity in America”). This novel is also one of the science fiction entries. Richard Mirabella (Opening like a fairy tale and ending like a nightmare, this cannonball of a queer coming-of-age novel follows a young man's relationship with a violent older boyfriend…). Vibhuti Jain. Sharon Dodua Otoo.

Michelle Min Sterling, another science fiction writer (Camp Zero cleverly explores how the intersection of gender, class, and migration will impact who and what will survive in a warming world.) Science fiction ain't what she used to be, by dab! Elvin James Mensah (And then there's the violent affair with an older man that Harley finds himself slipping back into . . .) Apparently violent gay sexual relationships with older men are the going thing this year. But hell, Samuel Delany, perpetually decked out in head-to-toe chrome-studded black leather, was writing that shit back in the mid-seventies, probably with a grace and weirdness nobody today could even come close to matching. If you doubt me, download Dhalgren from Amazon and give it a spin around the block.

This next one I want to examine on its own.

“Yume Kitasei's The Deep Sky is an enthralling sci-fi thriller debut about a mission into deep space… It is the eve of Earth’s environmental collapse.”

The author is female. One diversity point. She is an American of Japanese descent. 3 diversity points, not as many as she would merit were she black, but you can’t have everything. And her book is set on the eve of Earth’s environmental collapse. That gets her another five science narrative points for employing the well-nigh obligatory climate catastrophe real science trope. All together it is enough to get her past the gorgons from the Seven Sisters and the Ivy League who guard the gates of the Big Five houses. These came within a whisker of becoming the Big Four not so long before, but the long-standing (and expensive) efforts on the part of PenguinRandomHouse to buy Simon & Schuster finally collapsed in ruin in November of last year, because nobody in their right financial mind actually wants to own a book publisher, unless there are significant strippable assets available.

So the five remain, functional bankrupts in a dying industry, yet somehow continuing to stagger on, fueled by janky debt and the ritual screwing of every author they can get their hands on. They are Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan. I sold a lot of science fiction novels to imprints owned by HarperCollins and Penguin Random House, 23 all told. Another five were one or two-offs to imprints like Prima, New Market, Corgi, Writer’s Digest Books, and New Market Publications. And then, about ten years ago, I stopped selling to the Bigs. The editorial policies had become lockstep, and unless I wrote stuff that appealed to the Seven Gorgon Sisters Gang, or the Ivy League Medusa Molls, my agent (formerly my editor at Harper and one of the gangsters herself) told me she couldn’t sell it. The problem was, I couldn’t swallow my gorge (and pride) long and hard enough to write that crap. That is essentially why I self-published Lightning Fall on Amazon. My agent had been talking the book up, and there was enough interest that she planned on holding an auction…if I made certain changes. Changes I just could not bring myself to make. So I didn’t. And I have never tried to return to the walled New York garden of horrors that the Big Five have become today.

It is often said the politics is downstream from culture, but hell, everything is downstream from culture, and what has happened in the writing game is a perfect example of this. The Diversity, Equity, Inclusion feminists squeezed what was once a vast and vibrant literary landscape into a few clone-branded toothpaste tubes, and this has had the unintended downside of forcing a lot of writers, and a lot of good writing, out of the field entirely. Science fiction in particular has suffered terribly, mostly at its own hands. But the harpies sure helped.

Now, don’t get me wrong. While I may see these losses as a downside, they certainly do not. In fact, I shouldn’t be surprised if they don’t dance in circles, high-fiving each other, every time another longtime cis-het white guy writer gives up the ghost or, like Stephen King, money-gusher though he is, forces himself and his writing into ever more constricted intellectual and literary girdles of wokeness in order to remain viable. Yes, you heard that correctly. One of the highest-selling authors America has ever produced has turned himself into a pathetic joke. King was never what you could call a conservative, but he used to be a middle of the road sort of liberal white guy you would find at SF&F/Horror cons, having a few in the Green Room and behaving like a normal human being. Now he’s prancing around like a shaman in a hyper-progressive skin suit, shrieking his devotions at the invisible demons that plague him.

His writing has become unreadable. Just as the culture that destroyed it - and him - has become unbearable.

I ran some numbers on that list of buzzy debut novels. Being a male, (no, I don’t identify as male, I am male, because it’s a chromosome thing, not an identification thing) I was struck by the paucity of men on the list. Turns out there are only twelve out of 105 authors. Digging further, of the 12 men, six are openly gay. At least four of the novels appear to be LGBT or Queer themed. Of the remaining six men, three are of Asian or Asian-American extraction. One is Native American.

One of them pulls off an amazing hat trick: He is Asian, (his name, Jinwoo Chong, will look pleasingly diverse on the cover of his book, which Goodreads has tagged as including LGBT and Queer elements, and - bonus! - it discusses “the pervasive nature of whiteness within the development of Asian identity in America.” Repeat the catechism after me, please: Systemic white supremacy. Amen. But he doesn’t stop there. He also is an Ivy Leaguer who graduated from Columbia University, and after graduation he worked first for Time Magazine, then The Atlantic, and currently resides at our national progressive cathedral, The New York Times. In terms of entree to the offices of Big Five acquisition editors, he’s got more get out of jail free cards than a crate full of Monopoly games.

Just going on the face value of the names alone, I thought that perhaps Joe Milan, Jr., Tom Crewe, or Josh Reidel might break this DEI literary strait-jacket, but Joe turns out to be Korean-American, and his book centers on the dire results of the United States deporting a blameless illegal immigrant Korean-American youth back to Korea, where he doesn’t even speak the language. As for Tom Crewe, he’s British, (Seven Sisters women love a bit of Brit, eat them up like jam if classy enough, and he is: He took his doctorate at Cambridge, and is currently an editor at The London Review of Books. He’s also gay, his novel is about gay and lesbian couples, and brother, you don’t have any of that sort of juice.

Which brings us to the one guy who sticks out like a sore thumb. Josh Reidel. It could only be worse if his name was Chad. Or Whitey. His Instagram contains many pictures of women, and none of them seem to be running from him, so I’m going to hazard an assumption that he’s cis-het. (Not sure there’s much downside to that assumption if it turns out to be wrong). And his novel is set in the milieu of Silly Valley startup tech hijinks. So how on earth could he have made it past the Big Five harpy firewall? Heck, he even left his “real” job a couple of years ago. Maybe he thinks he’s struck a gold mine with that first novel?

No. Not at all. Because he’s got the biggest bowl of sweetener going for him of anybody in that entire crew. Yeah, he’s white, and he’s het. He’s got a very acceptable BA in Literature from Reed College, and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona. It’s not Harvard, but it’s still respectable. And he’s pretty good looking, and barely 40 yet. As far as I can tell, he’s unmarried.

All of which pales into insignificance when compared to this. You see, back in October of 2010, Josh connected with a couple of guys named Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, who hired him as the first employee of their little photo app startup. Josh became the company’s community manager, and helped them to build out their user base. He did a pretty good job, apparently, because a year and a half later another youngish tech guy bought their company (which by then was all the way up to nine employees), and he paid them a billion dollars for it. The guy was Jeff Zuckerberg, and their little company was called Instagram. Zuck forked over $300 million in cash, and the rest in Meta stock. The two founders got the bulk of it, of course, but there was still a hundred million or so to spread around the remaining employees, probably based on options and seniority.

Long story short. These three-headed female dogs guarding the moats at the Big Five may be crazy woke, but they aren’t actually cray-cray. And you know what a mid-thirtyish, (at the time) white, straight, good looking filthy rich guy looks like to them? A huge, heaping, gleaming pile of marriage bait, that’s what. With sugar, whipped cream, and a cherry on top.

He probably had to fight his way out of their various offices to keep from being injured by the fat contracts they were throwing at him.

The bottom line to all of this is that out of 105 “buzziest novels of 2023,” not one single lucky author was a basic, normal, ordinary, straight white man. Not one.

I’m quite sure that nobody connected with this state of affairs has ever given a single thought to potential downsides, either. Which means that when their ship of fools finally hits an iceberg, it will probably go down with all hands.

Bon voyage.

Swimming Downstream From the Culture Pool is a reader-supported publication. To receive the full benefits of this site, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Free is good, but paid is a lot better for both of us.