...navel-gazing literary bullshit...

"...90% of it is meandering navel-gazing literary bullshit absent of any real politics whatsoever..."

My original point was more about genre fiction being hijacked by the literati than the actual writers consciously seeing "speculative fiction" as another means to further literary dreck. I wouldn't presume to know what a relatively big group of writers were thinking when they wrote their respective texts, but I'm pretty sure there wasn't any conspiratorial monthly meeting thing where they all planned to write "speculative fiction". It was more Alfar maybe seeing all this work generated that had similar traits and wanting to provide a platform for these works to be seen and read and discussed, but I do think that it was Alfar's aesthetics that did dictate the initial salvo - and the immediate work generated right after - of "speculative fiction", and that salvo generally had the literary college-writing vibe, what I disparagingly described as "meandering navel-gazing literary bullshit", because more or less that was what most of the writers had as a framework to build their works upon. Three years on, my point isn't that accurate anymore, but it's still as good a description as any, seeing as really, most of them were only incidentally "scifi" or "fantasy", being middle-class ennui, ie meandering navel-gazing literary bullshit, with only holograms and spaceships and dragons and nymphs instead of TV and BMWs and drug addicts and prostitutes. They were still complaining about not getting the girl, and in the usual way. No discussion of the noveau norms a future society might have. No discussion of the sexual politics of a world with donkey-cocked centaurs in it. They weren't inherently "scifi" or "fantasy". They were literary contempo "realist" texts in "speculative fiction's" clothing.

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