Eventually, I will finish my reread of Wheel of Time, at which point there are any number of fantasy books I could choose to read from my reading list. Despite my efforts to stay abreast of current developments in the genre, very few of those books are from recent years. Many of the books I hear about being written today simply don’t interest me, but I’ve realized that some of my selection bias for older books may be a result of how those books are described. Or, more precisely, how modern books are described. Many modern books which intrigue me enough to look up a description, or which I hear or read about, lose me at the description stage because they are not highlighting what I’m looking for in a story.
It seems like almost every big-name modern fantasy book I consider adding to my reading list has a description that spends more time informing me what modern political identity groups the characters represent, and what trendy political ideologies and narratives the book addresses, than it does telling me what the book will actually be about, what the individual characters might actually be like, and why I as a reader should care to spend my time and money reading this particular book. Is this actually helping books to sell? Because it certainly isn’t helping sell books to me. Our real-world identity groups are (or should be) meaningless in the contexts of genre stories, especially in secondary world fantasy, and besides, books should be about individuals, not groups. A good, compelling, and interesting character will be those things regardless of which boxes they might check on a modern census form. Plots are rich, interesting, and revealing when they cover themes universal to the human condition, not themes specific to certain political perspectives steeped in the particular peculiarities of the modern day Western world. In fact, I find the emphasis on identity groups and modern political ideals so off-putting that I don’t read books that might otherwise have wound up on my list.
Maybe this is simply the curmudgeon in me. To be fair, marketers are far from stupid. They do extensive research, and typically have access to significant data, so these book descriptions must be doing something positive for book sales. I have to wonder, then, do I look for such radically different things in my books than does the typical reader? Perhaps this is like how I don’t prioritize physical descriptions of my characters in my own writing, because I tend not to notice these things so much when I read.
From a marketing perspective, then, we must assume it is an effective technique, and if it is truly only a transient trend in book summaries and descriptions, then this is just an old curmudgeon complaining about how things just aren’t like they used to be. Speaking of which, I should write a post about product lifespans and planned obsolescence from an engineer’s perspective one of these days. Ahem. Where this trend in descriptions and summaries becomes more concerning is if it is reflective of how authors are approaching writing. Not that there’s one single correct way to approach a story, of course. However, stories trying to convey a Message, rather than tell, well, a story, are very liable to become polemics.
The power of speculative fiction has long been that it can recontextualize contemporary issues into more palatable forms so that we can think more clearly about them. Star Trek is particularly famous for its ability to explore social issues in ways that would have spurred far more controversy and been less productive of the conversation on those topics if they were not presented as science fiction. However, those episodes were strongest when they were firmly grounded in the story, and whatever larger social message was incidental, arising almost by accident (or so it might seem) from the plot and the characters. So, it’s not that I don’t think speculative fiction has a role to play in exploring such concepts. Merely that it shouldn’t be the main lens or focus.
IGC Publishing 