hot new trends in imperial bureaucracy

that's right I'm complaining about SFF novels again

Sometimes you read a book that you don’t think is bad, or even dislike, but that still fills you with a kind of formless loathing. This loathing often isn’t aesthetic: it’s not about the book on its own terms but is usually something closer to a moral and political dissatisfaction. It’s about where the book doesn’t go, and the paths the writer didn’t choose, and how these absences fit into broader failures of imagination within publishing trends themselves, for which an individual writer can’t be held responsible, but maybe a larger literary culture can and should be.