I'd personally like to see more gender non-conforming roles in societies.
In a society with magic or space tech, why does there need to be a coded gender for certain jobs?
This goes for 'character classes' too. I'd love to see more healer archetypes that are cis male, or wizard types that are black or brown without relying on stereotypes.
I'd also like to see more of that in occupations too. Why not have a union of earth magic construction workers who happen to be mostly women in one city?
What about the rest of you? What cool things would you live to see in sci-fi/fantasy?
I'd like to see more settings where humans are just a humble part of a larger nonhuman community, or maybe aren't even there at all.
Decades of "humanity fuck yeah" cryptofascist/exceptionalist themes have worn me out. :doomer:
I like what they do for the culture series, earth humans aren't even a factor in the first chunk of books - there was some huge space battle in the 1600s that corresponded with some nebula activity or whatever. Although, there's something called "meta-humanity" which presumably means a bunch of humans were seeded everywhere or human-shape is apparently optimal for intelligence.
Also, you can change what you look like pretty freely in the culture - including to like clouds of gas and shit.
Iirc in the Culture "human" is just a series of checkboxes for your morphology and there's loads of aliens that don't look that way and have their own morphological kindred.
hard agree, it sucks that the largest and basically only scifi short story subreddit is like that, i still sometimes pick through for hidden gems but its like panning for gold in the sewer under that place with billion dollar gold encrusted pizza