Yesterday's news leads me to forecast the next big thing in SF/F genre fiction: the Cosy Dystopia—a future or fantasy setting in which the backdrop is ghastly but the sympathetic protagonists are running a tea shop in the borderlands.
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Yesterday's news leads me to forecast the next big thing in SF/F genre fiction: the Cosy Dystopia—a future or fantasy setting in which the backdrop is ghastly but the sympathetic protagonists are running a tea shop in the borderlands.
Think Warhammer 40,000 space marines, with added knitting. (Narrative focus STRONGLY on the knitting.)
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@cstross : it is already there.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built, from Becky Chambers, has a very ghastly backdrop (I mean, everyone is dead, civilisation has totally collapsed. It can’t be more dark than that) but, because the main character drinks tea, everyone seems to find that the book is "hopeful" and "inspiring".
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@ploum @cstross I may have missed or misinterpreted that when I read it, but where does it say that everyone is dead and civilization has collapsed? There are cities; they've just transitioned to low-energy tech and economy. The robots even left peacefully.
(I didn't particularly like the book, but I don't see the dystopian backdrop in it.)
