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The Extractivism of Setting and the Traitor’s Text – Vajra Chandrasekera

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There is a particular tendency in genre fiction very well demonstrated by this thing that Jayaprakash Satyamurthy found under a rock and dragged into the light last year (from a now-deleted twitter account, but preserving the text and image here.) The fact that this book – which features not a single Asian author – found a publisher, even if a very small one – in 2021 shows how swathes of genre literature are just completely moribund exercises in irrelevance. And yes, I like one of the authors in this book. Or rather, there are quite a few things happening here at the same time, and they are adjacent, perhaps, but distinct. Let us disentangle them somewhat. Sometime in the mid-twentyteens, Bryan Thomas Schmidt put out a subs call for an anthology of fiction from writers around the world—the phrase he used, in fact, was “foreign natives”—except Africa, because he’d already got Mike Resnick to represent Africa. Why did he think Mike Resnick, a white American, could represent Africa in su

There is a particular tendency in genre fiction very well demonstrated by this thing that Jayaprakash Satyamurthy found under a rock and dragged into the light last year (from a now-deleted twitter account, but preserving the text and image here.) The fact that this book – which features not a single Asian author – found a publisher, even if a very small one – in 2021 shows how swathes of genre literature are just completely moribund exercises in irrelevance. And yes, I like one of the authors in this book. Or rather, there are quite a few things happening here at the same time, and they are a

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