I believe in the power of books that make me feel something. Characters who live in my head for a lifetime. Worlds that fill me with a sense of adventure. Deep dives into the human psyche that unmake me. Thought experiments that challenge how I think.
And I thought that was what sci-fi and fantasy (SFF) were still about.
But I was wrong.
In 2023, I started researching the publishing industry, and what I found horrified me. Traditional publishers don’t care about quality. They shotgun books out to see what sticks. Self-published authors fixate on tropes and write them again and again and again.
They all do it for the same reason: the bottomline. Ursula K. Le Guin describes them in her essay “The Stone Ax and the Muskoxen” as “authors who deliberately write junk for money. . . .”
And audiences keep this flywheel spinning. They demand the tropes. They demand flimsy stories. They demand constant entertainment. They demand lasers and fairies and elves and space aliens and time travel and dragons. They demand the surface level. They demand escape.
Escape from reality. Escape from responsibility. Escape from growth.
Escape was never the point of SFF. Both, at their hearts, are meant to help us to grow stronger. To understand. To feel. To learn. To become richer, fuller people.
And I’ve watched too many readers and writers defend escapism as its own good with the tone of a man telling me how much better his life is now that he’s addicted to drugs.
So with this newsletter we’ll call bullshit on escapism for escapism’s sake. We’ll battle against tropes and lazy writing. We’ll demand more of our fiction authors. We’ll show readers and writers the beauty and truth they can experience.
We’re going to elevate SFF and ourselves.
But we can’t do this by tugging on our own bootstraps to lift ourselves into the air.
We’re going to study the greats (Asimov, Tolkien, Le Guin, Butler, Lewis, Clarke, etc.).
We’re going to read powerful new SFF stories that aspire beyond entertainment to art.
And I’m going to share my own SFF fiction to demonstrate in my failures and successes what trying to write powerful stories looks like.
About me…
I’m an entrepreneur, reader, writer, father, husband, former professor, juggler, whiskey infuser, runner, etc. My life, heart, and mind have been changed by books like Of Mice and Men, The Beginning Place, An Experiment in Criticism, The Horse and His Boy, This Side of Paradise, Demon Copperhead, David Copperfield, Alice in Wonderland, The Great Divorce, The Lord of the Rings, The Man Who Was Thursday, Blue Like Jazz, The Last Unicorn, Scaramouche, Lord of the Flies, and tons more.
I want so badly to help people feel what I’ve felt when I’ve read a book that hit me hard. But doing that is always better with friends, so join me. Let’s talk about sci-fi/fantasy, and let’s change lives.
