From the introduction by Sim Kern:

From the introduction by Sim Kern: Speculative fiction started pulling its punches in the 2010s. Stories were scrubbed clean of any grit. Authors sanded down sharp edges, and the safest bet was to write low-stakes, low-conflict, “cozy” fiction—a label that came to define a booming sub-genre. Don’t get me wrong—these aesthetics stemmed from legitimate critiques of genre fiction that had come before. Western scifi, fantasy, and horror stories of decades prior often did contain white supremacist, sexist, etc. elements, and so conversations about avoiding harmful tropes were long overdue. The culture of interrogating authors’ identities and questioning whether they were “allowed” to write about people unlike them, came from the desire to make room for marginalized voices in a publishing industry that was (and remains) dominated by white people. And the demand for trigger warnings and cozy options in genre fiction was an understandable reaction to the extreme, graphic violence—especially,…