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Eighteen Authors, Two Big Questions: What Is the Best Thing Happening in SFF Right Now, and What Do We Need More Of?
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Eighteen Authors, Two Big Questions: What Is the Best Thing Happening in SFF Right Now, and What Do We Need More Of?
What do some of the biggest names in SFF have to say about current bookish trends, or what the future might hold?
By Christina Orlando
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Published on September 17, 2024
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Recently, I had the honor of attending WorldCon in Glasgow, a weekend-long sci-fi/fantasy celebration that is equally, if I’m honest, delightful and exhausting—because there are so many things to be part of! From panels to the Hugo Award ceremony, WorldCon is a whirlwind of SFF fans and writers, all gathered to geek out on the things we love about speculative fiction. One of the best parts is getting to meet authors of books I’ve loved and chat to them about the work we all do. And what I wanted to know most was how they viewed the changes and trends that are happening within SFF right now, and where they hope to see things go.
Here is how they responded.
What is your favorite trend or theme in speculative fiction from the past 10 years?
Amal El-Mohtar: Favorite is hard because, the one that is top of mind is the one that is most recent and current for me. What I’m enjoying is what I’m calling, like, in Spotify day list language: queer millennial multi-versal crisis. I am just really enjoying it. It’s basically anything that involves looking at one’s life in terms of, like, missed connections, sliding doors, a sort of, like, who could I have been if? Why am I who I am? Those kinds of things are really, really animating me right now. And I see it in Aimee Pokwatka’s Self-Portrait With Nothing, which I adored, I see it in Emmett North’s In Universes, in Jo Harkin’s Tell Me An Ending —oh, there was another one—oh of course! Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds. Many things that involves that sort of like, ruminating on why are things the way they are and what could they be if. It’s a very Hadestown thing of, like, the way the world could be, the way that it is. I love seeing those things together. That is the most recent thing. Other than that, like, my broad answer is lesbians. When I think back 15 years, I remember very specifically being like, I just feel a dearth of books where women talk to each other, and where specifically friendships between women are really important and stuff. And now I feel like there is this beautiful, thriving circuit of that, and I’m dwelling in it. I am thriving, I’m living in it. It’s like, you know, clearing my skin, watering my crops, I love it. And the other I wanna be very clear about this: part of what’s exciting to me about it is dirtbag lesbians. Like, I wanna see lesbians being bad. I’m also enjoying a lot more horniness, I guess! I’m here for it. It makes me very happy. So, yeah, I guess that’s where I’m at. You know? It’s like queer, multi-versal, midlife crises, and lesbians.
Arkady Martine: In a weird way, queer norm worlds because I’m just bored of having to deal otherwise, and I’m way more interested in just…people are people.
Catriona Ward: What I really love is the the explosion of new voices and diversity because, particularly in horror, there was a conception that there’s just one kind of thing that people are afraid of, and now because you understand that there are so many different kinds of people who put so many different challenges with people and different kinds of circumstances in life. There are so many fears. I mean, Get Out is the ultimate like, ur-text for this. But what we’re living in is this almost deconstructed type of fear, where you realize that fear is more universal and also more particular than you it’s ever been, I love that.
Constance Fay: I like the growing accessibility of sci-fi for women. Not that it wasn’t before, but there’s just so much more now that it’s opening up for everyone. It’s not just like an old white man’s genre now.
Em X. Liu: Can I go broad and say more lesbians? I feel like there’s been more, you know, a little niche that’s been carved out that’s, you know, specifically speculative fiction featuring both heavy plot and also fun. Like, not necessarily romance, but just like, you know, very very interesting, complicated, messy, ruthless female protagonist. A lot of those are, you know, sapphic or queer. Mhmm. And I think that’s really great because you don’t really see that little niche anywhere else.
Holly Black: I think that the best thing in that, you know, last 10 years is the expansion of science fiction and fantasy to encompass more ethnicities, more diversity across every different platform. You know? Like, it’s just the thing that has changed for the better and is so wonderful.
K. M. Szpara: I’m trying to get fucking weird, and I love that people are getting weird.
Kathleen Jennings: Haunted highways, haunted highways.
Kerstin Hall: Female presenting characters who are not necessarily trying or motivated by wanting to rescue people or do the right thing. Actually – and I think, like, gestalts, like people sharing one body. And not just because I wrote it myself, it’s in Gideon the Ninth. Definitely that. That’s coming up my mind. People doing shared body stuff, that’s very cool.
Joe Abercrombie: Oh, my days. That’s a different difficult one, there are so many. I mean, I like werewolves, to be honest. The most recent book I’ve written is heavy on the werewolves. I mean, I, myself, have never done werewolves before, so I was excited to be able to indulge my wildest werewolf fantasies. That’s what I’ve done mostly. Scandinavian werewolves, specifically, Viking werewolves. I’m not into the rubbishy German ones. You know? Proper blood and lightning, Norse werewolves.
John Scalzi: Let’s see. Actually, romantasy has been really fun. Because it’s just cracked the whole thing open and people are like, you can do this in science fiction and fantasy? Cool. So I think that, just the fact that it is now realigning what people think fantasy and science fiction is is exactly what we should be doing.
Naomi Kritzer: Okay. That’s a hard question. Let me think about it. I really love the way, today’s fiction is reexamining and reinterpreting some of the tropes and ideas from, like, the previous generation of fiction. So, for example, Emily Tesh’s novel [Some Desperate Glory], and it’s reexamination of Ender’s Game. I think this is a particularly clear example of that, but I do think it’s part of a larger trend where people look at books, classics, or tropes and ask new questions about them.
Neon Yang: I love that there’s lots and lots of queer fiction. Yeah. Like, more queer fiction is great!
Nghi Vo: A real appreciation of enemies to lovers and seeing a lot more queer people become enemies to lovers.
Samantha Shannon: I’ve got to admit, as someone who is a big fan of them, I love that dragons are so in fashion at the moment. I mean, I think they’re very timeless, so I think they’ll always be around in some capacity. But I love that there’s such a huge hunger for dragons at the moment. Because to me, I think they represent they represent fantasy in a way. It’s like the the desire for magic, the desire for wonder, but it can also represent evil and a source of great dread. I just love that they’re back at the moment.
Sarah Beth Durst: Cozy fantasy!
Sung-Il Kim: Oh, I’m not sure if I can recognize anything. But what I really like is, for the past 10 years, a lot of cultural diversity. That is probably my favorite thing. Even the, you know, non-BIPOC writers, they are trying to dig into previously obscure myths or invent new. Because it’s different from the 80’s and 90’s. So that’s probably my favorite thing.
T.L. Huchu: I’m gonna say African SFF and Afro SFF, but closely followed by cozy sci-fi. Like, you give me that TJ Klune or Travis Baldree, Legends and Lattes, that stuff. It just tugs at the heartstrings.
What would you like to see more of in the next 10 years?
Amal El-Mohtar: That’s such a good question, the next 10 years. You know, I’m aware that when I find myself wanting to answer this, I don’t want it to come from a place of nostalgia. And I’m aware of the fact that I’m at an age where some of the things that are delighting me, the most are things that revisit stuff from my childhood in, like, weird, interesting new ways. And I know that I’m at the age where I’m being marketed to by that specifically. So seeing Interview With the Vampire delights me. Seeing X-Men ’97 delights me. But I don’t want to be pandered to in that specific way in the next 10 years. I don’t know if this is too froofy an answer but I really want to be dazzled and surprised, you know? To me, wanting to see more queerness means not just box ticking categories of, like, how many chocolate box kinds of queer can we see in a book representation-wise. I’m really interested to see books that queer shit, like queer as a verb. Maybe that’s what I’d say, I want to see queer as a verb more in books. I wanna see genre boundaries blurred at the same time that I wanna see really unapologetic deep dives into genre furniture to be like, give me the most melodramatic shit. Give me, like, the most maximalist iteration of the genre that you want and stuff. I think I just wanna see a lot more unabashed… something that is activating and lovely. It also feels very selfish and inchoate to say I just wanna be dazzled. I wanna be charmed. I think she also wanna see just, like, more I would love to see more SF digestion of other modes of writing. How can I put this? I just I wish I want people to read outside of genre so that they can bring into genre things that are exciting in other places. I wanna see cross-pollination. I just wanna see people being dazzled and excited by other stuff and then, like, bringing it in and exchanging. That’s where I thrive, I find. That’s why people get mad at my column a lot because it’s like, ‘where’s the science fiction and where is the fantasy?’ And I’m like, it’s here, it just looks different. It just looks different than what you have read.
Arkady Martine: Complicated explorations of sociological theory.
Catriona Ward: I’d like to see less of women falling down in [horror] movies when they run away. Like, every time. They never do it to a man. They always fucking fall down. I just think it’s just incredible how that’s the one trope that remains. Like, you know, Tom Cruise is, like, pounding away like a 1000 miles an hour. And then someone equally fit and wonderful just for some reason…maybe it’s their boobs are too heavy. Who do you know? Of course. Their boobs are too heavy, their hair is too high. I would like to see less of women falling down.
Constance Fay: I would say fun. There’ve been a lot of focus on gritty and dark things, and so I’d really like there to be a lot more effervescence.
Em X. Liu: Yeah. I think more different speculative futures. I feel like we get stuck in that dystopian route. There’s been some interesting things with, like, more solarpunk, hopepunk type worldbuilding. But more different ways of imagining the potential futures. And also, I think more, like, modernity and magic mixed in. Because everyone’s raving about The Saint of Bright Doors this year, which I think is genius because it so effortlessly mixes together the modern sort of apparatus that we’re used to. But also, it’s, like, deeply, deeply, deeply speculative, so more of that.
Holly Black: I mean, more of the same. You know, we’ve come up we’ve come some way, right? A significant way, but, obviously, we’re not at parity. We’re not there yet.
K.M. Szpara: Weirder, gayer shit. I feel like we’ve been doing so much making up for lost time, and now I’m like, can we let’s get beyond that and go 5 levels in advance.
Kathleen Jennings: Oh, I can’t say haunted highways, I assume. I have a specific request — I want all of the alternate history people to do is to explore what a world would look like if corporations hadn’t developed the way they have. A world without corporations. I really want to read it, no one’s written it yet.
Kerstin Hall: Weirdness. Definitely more weirdness.
Joe Abercrombie: Werewolves. And I suppose just more Joe Abercrombie books, generally. I’m a big fan, you know, I really like those. They’re exactly the kind of thing I like so, the more of those I can see out there in the marketplace, the happier I’ll be for sure.
John Scalzi: One of the great things in the last 15 years, there’s been so many more diverse authors and I want more of that.
Naomi Kritzer: It’s a hard one. What do I want to see more? The obvious answer is, like, more good books. Right? Like, it’s just not a good, that’s not a useful way to describe it. I actually sometimes struggle to even tell people what I’m looking for in books, but my my favorite books in the last couple of years have been, like, had really had really immersive worldbuilding, like, Fonda Lee’s Jade series. I loved how incredibly real that world felt. And, Lois McMaster Bujold’s fantasy is an also another one where it just has a really immersive, detailed world. I also really love Ursula Vernon’s work, both as Ursula and as T. Kingfisher. And, like, I love Ursula’s cranky old ladies. I really love her cranky old ladies. I love her, I love the World of White Rat. I love the the I love the idea behind the the the Church of the White Rat providing, like, divinely called warriors to defend the indigent and all that. I don’t even really know how to sum up what it is I love, more cranky old ladies. I love more cranky old ladies in my fiction.
Neon Yang: More queer fiction.
Nghi Vo: I’d love to see more stuff coming out of Southeast Asia. I’d love to see some more Eastern European spec fic. And I’d love to see some more slipstream stuff. I’d love to see some more nonlinear, non-sequential features.
Samantha Shannon: Oh, gosh. This I think the great thing about spec fic is that it’s only limited by the author’s imagination. So there’s so many places it could go just based on each individual person’s imagination being so rich and broad. I think I would love to see the genre continue to diversify. I would love to see, just mostly the way that it’s trending right now continue. There’s so many more women in fantasy, there’s so many more people of color, there’s so many more mythologies from across the world being brought in to it, so I’ve just really like to see that continue.
Sarah Beth Durst: Cozy fantasy.
Sung-Il Kim: Next 10 years. I want the breaking down and rebuilding all of the tropes. One of my pet peeves is that I really don’t like the chosen ones. We can be done with that. We’ve done it. They come up a lot, but I think this time people put a different spin on it.
T.L. Hutchu: I suppose if we go back to some, like, action adventure-y type stuff, I would love to see that. Something that will kickstart my nostalgia. I’m an 80s kid. So anyone who can do that will will get me.
[end-mark]
The post Eighteen Authors, Two Big Questions: What Is the Best Thing Happening in SFF Right Now, and What Do We Need More Of? appeared first on Reactor.
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