beroebluejeans:
“I feel there is a kind of terrible onus on queer authors at the moment to provide hope, namely because nobody else is goddamn bothering to, and I have been seduced like everyone else into loving it when I am provided with beautiful and positive and wonderful stories where people like me actually get to be happy for once — but I don’t think the flip side of that should be that queer authors writing homophobia, writing unhappy endings, burying our gays should be awful choices we are visiting on our gay audience. I talked with Kiwi SFF author Sascha Stronach, who wrote the wonderful queer noir fever dream The Dawnhounds last year, about how guilty we both felt about this. I hate that we felt guilty, but the only cure is for there to be so much queer fiction that one can find anything one desires — catharsis or reassurance; our best selves or our worst selves.”
Filed under YEAH THIS i don’t WANT to read happy sappy queer fiction all the time sometimes i do and that’s great! i’m glad it exists but i love a good tradgedy
i LOVE first contact with aliens stories, seriously it’s one of my favorite tropes, but authors writing it really need to understand that there’s no writing it without engaging with the colonial history behind it whether you intend to or not, and if your story is about humans settling on another planet you’re gonna look stupid if you don’t
Filed under also like. idk how to put it into words but. if your excuse for why humans are leaving earth is because it’s become uninhabitable. it will always always ALWAYS be easier to try and fix earth than to start over somewhere else literally even if earth has nothing but rocks it STILL has more going for it than even the most habitable exoplanet at least earth has air we can breathe gravity we can bear and is in the habitable zone and it’s not full of potential allergens or plants/animals that we can’t eat and we *already know* what’s edible and useful on earth which we’ve learned over millennia and also. hand waving all the shit like allergens and inedible flora/fauna. if your colonial humans are scratching a living from the soil and trying to find a niche for themselves in the local ecology. ugh what am i trying to say here like. *mean girls meme* so you DO acknowledge that ‘primitive’ technology is the best tools for this job? but it’s more than that. like okay these colonists are doing the best they can with what they have and so they’re not ‘primitive’? so you admit that the best way to ensure survival for future generations is to live sustainably? i get it. i get it. i love made up alien ecologies and i love survival stories but there’s gotta be (there is i’ve read it) a better way to tell them that doesn’t trash indigenous people while having your characters live like them like??? that’s what i’m trying to say. there’s some cognitive dissonance here i’m trying to tell a story about people doing colonizing and having them live off of and understand the land *IN not i’m