Stross on tech-free fiction

 Prolific novelist Charlie Stross earlier this month weighed-in on the habit of "serious" novelists to omit many basic features of the modern world:

My take: any “literary” novel that doesn’t exist in a world with magic internet mirrors in every hand, strange plagues exploding out of wet markets in Wuhan, and invisible killer robots haunting the skies above Kandahar, is historical nostalgia for a world that went away in 1990.

User Pickwick invites us to characterize such boring fiction as "grimdull", contrasting with e.g. "grimdark" and "grimpunk."

The deadwhitemaleness of school curricula and the YA canon

From the timeline, on that bird site, of Massachusetts poet Johnny Longfellow:

Try imagining all the public tax dollars that land in the coffers of the copyright holders of canonical texts. Then, you'll understand much of what underlies and drives toxic YA lit debates regarding which texts are deemed worthy of inclusion/exclusion within school curricula.

Imagine, too, the profits made by publishers who republish and promote works in the public domain for use in school curricula, minus any need to pay agents, authors, or their estates. So too, the profits made by those who create supplementary texts to accompany such works.

Yet, such factors are little discussed in YA circles, lest they distract from the seemingly well-intended and righteous topics of pedagogical practice, the inclusion of traditionally marginalized voices, and what values are transmitted to children/young adults via the humanities.