Blog/2026-05-13/Everything is about power

I read a recent comment by someone describing their book that instantly turned me off reading their work despite the fact that I'm a huge fan of sci-fi and adventure. It is impressive that they worked their way to completing the book but there is no chance I'll read it now. I don't mind reading random indie authors' work. Sometimes, like qntm's wikipedia:There Is No Antimemetics Division these become famous afterwards. More often, I forget the names of the works but it's nice to have read them nonetheless.

...It's scifi, 'weird' fiction, and a commentary on power in the guise of an adventure story...

This "commentary on power" stuff is excruciatingly boring text and it's everywhere. It's bad enough when someone describes another work in that way, in which case I know that the literary criticism is going to be incredibly sophomoric and pretend to academic theory by reuse of jargon, but it's worse when the author describes their own stuff that way. The state of literary criticism is such that almost all works are commentaries on power. Doubtless, Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster are about the power structures in a wealthy British household and how the butler exercises his agency to compel his employer to actions in a symbiotic fashion.

Perhaps future AI will automatically delete from my sight all text that references this. Aggravating content.