"105 of the Buzziest Debut Novels of the New Year". Uh-huh. I've given up on any such lists. The lists are filled with garbage, compiled by either ignoramuses or wokesters with an agenda. (Significant category overlap may be observed.)
IIRC, the final straw was "The 50 Most Significant Science Fiction Novels of All Time", which contained no EE Smith and the only Heinlein was /Stranger in a Strange Land/.
Diversity points are to a novel what CGI is to a movie: occasionally significant or interesting, usually a distraction, and almost always a replacement for good storytelling.
re /Lightning Fall/, IIRC you said that the main selling point to the editors, or maybe the agent, was that the main protagonist was a gay man. Never mind the realistic warning of an actual threat to the US people and nation. Never mind the realistic depiction of prepping and how it can save your bacon in a crisis. No, the novel had a /gay man/! Let me shop it around! (But first, make these tiny little changes...)
"but they aren’t actually cray-cray". Yah, right. Let's check their medicine cabinets and purses for head-meds. (A large minority of women in the US have prescriptions for mental problems, close to a majority when you look only at liberal, urban women not in a long-term, committed, heterosexual relationship) I can accept that assertion with the interpretation that they're self-serving enough and aware enough of The Wall that they can set their true beliefs aside long enough to try to get something for themselves.
I read almost no fiction from the major publishers, and that only by authors whom I've been reading for decades. Most of the fiction I read is either independent or classics, with a tiny bit of small-press thrown in. Let the Big Five go down with all hands. Something better can be built from the wreckage, or there's nothing worthwhile in the wreckage.
You know, though, lots of people seemed to like that gay guy. Glenn Reynolds said that his favorite characters were "the two married, heavily armed gay survivalist preppers," or something to that effect. Nor did I put those characters in the book to be woke, a term which did not exist when I was writing it. I just liked how they cut against so many different stereotypes. Just as I had a 17 year old boy suddenly forced to become a man and take over the family leadership from his mom, a character who annoyed my (female) agent no end. "I don't know any boys who could be that mature," she said. She probably doesn't know anybody who voted for Trump, either.
That said, my situation with the Big Five is pretty simple: I don't want to write what they want, they don't want to buy what I write, and, just as with my relationship with the formal SF writer culture, I've left that all behind.
Oh, sure. "Occasionally significant or interesting". In this case it was an interesting character in his own right. Being gay was part of his character but he wasn't in the book solely because the book needed a gay character from Central Casting.
"105 of the Buzziest Debut Novels of the New Year". Uh-huh. I've given up on any such lists. The lists are filled with garbage, compiled by either ignoramuses or wokesters with an agenda. (Significant category overlap may be observed.)
IIRC, the final straw was "The 50 Most Significant Science Fiction Novels of All Time", which contained no EE Smith and the only Heinlein was /Stranger in a Strange Land/.
Diversity points are to a novel what CGI is to a movie: occasionally significant or interesting, usually a distraction, and almost always a replacement for good storytelling.
re /Lightning Fall/, IIRC you said that the main selling point to the editors, or maybe the agent, was that the main protagonist was a gay man. Never mind the realistic warning of an actual threat to the US people and nation. Never mind the realistic depiction of prepping and how it can save your bacon in a crisis. No, the novel had a /gay man/! Let me shop it around! (But first, make these tiny little changes...)
"but they aren’t actually cray-cray". Yah, right. Let's check their medicine cabinets and purses for head-meds. (A large minority of women in the US have prescriptions for mental problems, close to a majority when you look only at liberal, urban women not in a long-term, committed, heterosexual relationship) I can accept that assertion with the interpretation that they're self-serving enough and aware enough of The Wall that they can set their true beliefs aside long enough to try to get something for themselves.
I read almost no fiction from the major publishers, and that only by authors whom I've been reading for decades. Most of the fiction I read is either independent or classics, with a tiny bit of small-press thrown in. Let the Big Five go down with all hands. Something better can be built from the wreckage, or there's nothing worthwhile in the wreckage.
You know, though, lots of people seemed to like that gay guy. Glenn Reynolds said that his favorite characters were "the two married, heavily armed gay survivalist preppers," or something to that effect. Nor did I put those characters in the book to be woke, a term which did not exist when I was writing it. I just liked how they cut against so many different stereotypes. Just as I had a 17 year old boy suddenly forced to become a man and take over the family leadership from his mom, a character who annoyed my (female) agent no end. "I don't know any boys who could be that mature," she said. She probably doesn't know anybody who voted for Trump, either.
That said, my situation with the Big Five is pretty simple: I don't want to write what they want, they don't want to buy what I write, and, just as with my relationship with the formal SF writer culture, I've left that all behind.
Oh, sure. "Occasionally significant or interesting". In this case it was an interesting character in his own right. Being gay was part of his character but he wasn't in the book solely because the book needed a gay character from Central Casting.
That's accurate. The word "part" is key.