(growing up's for old people and other stories)

Having nearly exhausted the ready supply of plotty IC novellas in the fandoms and pairings I'm willing to read, as well as long-- long!-- yaoi manga (for now), I've been-- gasp!-- resorting to actual printed material for sustenance. I highly recommend Patricia McKillip's latest ('Od Magic'), for example, if anything because of the whole magical-school thing that um, some of us might be partial to. But the real surprise has been Judith Berman's 'Bear Daughter', which was such a fresh and involving fantasy, with such a new and distinctive and vivid voice that I'm still sort of 'recovering'.

Of course, I myself am biased in regards to any fantasy based in actual folklore (in this case the Pacific Native American), as well as anything that starts with a transformational premise like a bear turning into a girl, but. It is just... delightful. And um, she has an lj (filomancer), too. Heh. Shouldn't be so surprising, but somehow still startles me that people who're so good at writing are like... human and stuff. I know, I know, I should've gotten with the program by now, but... the more distant they are, the most... um, justified I myself feel, maybe.
    (Yeah, all of this talent is nearly enough to make me forget how inadequate I feel about not having written anything substantial to date. But it definitely... pings.)

    My point is actually that I found that she's also written a couple of brilliant meta-essays on the nature and real purpose of sci-fi, Science Fiction Without the Future and Models of Time: Imagining the Future, from which I couldn't resist taking a quote:
    Along with everything else that can be said about the imagined future, it's about the possibilities of Now. Restrict our exploration of those possibilities, good and bad--diminish our capacity or freedom or will to think about them--and you've diminished freedom of thought and action in a fundamental way, along with whatever chance there is to affect the direction of the future purposively. Or to phrase this another way: to the degree that the future fades from the world of ideas and imagination, our sense of possibility about the present vanishes.

If the future is nearly beyond imagination, all the more reason to work hard at imagining it. As with freedom of expression generally, it's important not just to have the right to imagine the future, but to use that right, to challenge threats to it, to stretch the limits of imagination, to grow and change as the present and its futures change. Use it or lose it.

Man, this forward-looking philosophy is why I loved sci-fi when I was growing up, and why I've been so frustrated with it, too. And why I'm still enamoured of the idea of a 'Higher Purpose' for science fiction. *sigh* It just makes me all... hopeful and perversely nostalgic for my own youth when I had these ideals burning full-strength. And perhaps that's why science fiction is near-drowning in nostalgia in the first place-- because in the end, childhood is when the future was so bright we'd all invented shades.
~~

Also: it occurs to me that if you summed up my Major Frustration and/or Basic Beef with fandom, it'd say: 'Why do you all constantly write romances for the tortured awful bastard while simultaneously making it so that he's not actually the awful bastard you're supposedly attracted to??!'
    I can never decide if I want an answer or a way out, goddammit, lemme ouuuuuuut. -.- In other words, I feel like I want A Solution, though I'm 100% aware there is actually no solution to issues stemming from human nature itself. That is probably the source of my beef with the universe at large, forget fandom. I'm sort of an, um... nihilist/determinist optimist/transhumanist. It's... wearying to say the least. Though on my good days, I'm something of an apathetic hedonist (but then I feel guilty and want to purge. Sad.)
    Um... if that was confusing, it's probably for the best, btw.