There was a post on a major genre blog a few days ago that rankled a bit when I read it.  I’m not going to link to it because I don’t want anyone to think I’m attacking the author.  I’m not.  I’d never heard of this person, although a search showed they had written some reviews I hadn’t bothered to read, mainly because the books they were reviewing were either not of interest to me or were in my TBR pile and I didn’t want to deal with spoilers.  To put it another way, I don’t know the author of the post, I bear the author no ill will, and I have no interest in personal attacks on the author.

Attacks on the author’s ideas, though, well, that’s another thing all together.

The author started the post saying we need more diversity in the field.

I’m not gonna argue with that.

I’ll repeat what I said for those of you who are slow or aren’t paying attention.

I have no problem with greater diversity in the fields of fantasy, science fiction, or horror.

None. What. So. Ever.

What I have a problem with is when identity, of any sort, becomes the driving factor in what is published and promoted.  When identity politics (or any other type of agenda) takes precedence over story.

This particular blogger chided people who prefer fiction from the Golden Age  who won’t read contemporary works because of the identity of the author.  Then turns around and says they (the author of the post) won’t read works from the Golden Age (naming two giants of the field) for essentially the same reason flipped around:  they aren’t diverse and tend to reflect a Eurocentric wolrdview.

Hypocrite.

I get that there are authors from any time period, contemporary, Golden Age, Antediluvian Age, whatever, who won’t be to a particular reader’s taste.  That’s just reality.  But it serves no one any good to publicly chide people who read what they want to read instead of what someone thinks they should be reading.  And, yes, this author did say that they get it that some people enjoy those older works and want to see them promoted.  but the tone at the end of the post wasn’t one of there’s plenty of room in the field for all tastes.  It was my tastes and preferences are the desired ones, and what I want to see published is what should be published.  It wasn’t worded that way,  but that was the message that came across.  The author strongly implied that readers who don’t read diverse writers were  dismissing them.

While there is some truth in that, meaning some readers won’t read certain works due to bias against the writer’s demographics, the author of the post paints with a pretty wide brush, implying all readers are like that.  And it’s not just this one particular blogger.  I’ve seen this attitude a lot over the last few years.  If a reader doesn’t like a certain book or story,or conversely does like a particular author/subgenre/etc.,  they are automatically labeled as some type of “ist” or “phobic”.

Which is not necessarily true.

For the most part, with only a few exceptions, I don’t really care about an author’s identity.  But the quickest way to not get me to read the authors you want me to read is to tell me (directly or indirectly) I shouldn’t be reading authors I like or tell me I should read a book based on the author’s race/gender/sexual preferences.  Tell me about the story.  What is it about the story that makes it awesome?  The setting?  The plot?  Characters who are fully dimensional and not token representatives?

If your answers to those questions can satisfy me, then I probably won’t care what the identity politics you insert into your story, because identity politics won’t be the point of the story.  Story should always trump everything else, including representation.

Why is this so hard to understand?

(Told you in the title of the post I was crankier than usual.)