🐯新年好🐯

I went to bed early on Monday night. So I'll just post most of an email I sent to my editor at the fortean website.

While collecting links to post on social media for Tuesday, I stumbled across an article at Psychology Today: Maslow, Sci-Fi, And The Sense Of Wonder. I found this article interesting and it made me wonder about the current state of SF. It seems 21st century SF seems to be more about society and acceptance rather than big ideas which could lead to innovation.

My unpopular opinion is women are trying the whole, "We can write SF as good as any stupid boy! Okay now kiss brontosaurus girl and human lady. Tee hee."

More realistically, people aren't reading deeply anymore. Science articles are ridiculously thin summaries of non-peer-reviewed articles from arXiv, and without the depth and understanding of the science there's only a gee-whiz factor rather than a sensawunda from the deeper underpinnings of the idea, discovery, etc. You know about publish or perish in academia? Same online with news outlets churning content like Karen Carpenter churned her lunch. A play on all the news that's print to fit, precipitating "journalism" which devolves into citing tweets rather than addressing deeper issues behind trite opinions in 288 characters or fewer.

By all means, pardon my use of the acronym which I do not use disparagingly, SJWs have a place. Star Trek: TOS was their wet dream, but they seem to forget that because TOS wasn't as woke as they would expect. But to turn an entire genre into just social commentary except it's on a spaceship does no good, nor does it serve to inspire and generate new ideas. Merely accepting what already exists, and even then it's not truly groundbreaking since most folks today are more accepting of others and otherness.

Right now it seems the only real science of interest are exoplanets, except every exoplanet becomes an exercise in fantasy bound to the data of the discovery rather than someone entirely from an author's mind like Dragon's Egg and Mesklin.

Around this point I realized I was rambling and cut my email short.