This debate has actual interesting content if you ignore the culture war stakes. With both Foundation and Rings of Power, I don’t even notice the DEIfication (🤣). But Bridgerton made me go “hell no.” Hamilton was better but still too much for me. Why?
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SFF has enough distance from historical inspirations to recode
Victorian England imo just doesn’t.
Hamilton… he might personally have a legacy a diverse future might want to claim as part of its own prehistory but it feels forced
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My wife tells me Bridgerton is set in an alternate timeline where Mad King George, pre-dementia, kicks off DEI a lot earlier than happened in our history; ie it technically is SF.
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Yeah that’s bs. If there aren’t FTL drives and such it’s not SF. This sounds like uninspired wishful counterfactualism
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It’s also a Regency romance novel, so yes: uninspired wishful counterfactualism is a load-bearing part of the genre.
Yeah, it isn’t a space opera, but speculative fiction like Man in the High Castle isn’t either.
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